BT 330 
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Copy 1 



THE 

DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION 



By the same Author. 



THE HIGHER LIFE: 

Its Reality, Experience, and Destiny, 
Crown Svo. Third Edition, 7 s. 6d. 

This book is sent forth in the hope that it may help some, 
especially among the young, to hold fast their faith in the great 
facts and truths which alone make this life of ours worth living 
at all. The earlier chapters glance at some of the recent 
speculations of science. 

' Very clearly and eloquently set forth.' Standard. 

'Mr. Baldwin Brown's writings are full of thought, beauty, and power, 
and repay the careful study, not only of those who have a penchant for 
theological reading, but of all intelligent persons. We have felt this more 
than ever whilst perusing this noble volume.' Baptist. 

1 We have here a volume of sermons of no ordinary character. Full of 
earnest expositions of truth set forth with great eloquence, they are at 
once seen to be the product of a well-stored and cultivated mind. The 
teaching throughout is of the right stamp, and the manner in which the 
doubts and difficulties of thoughtful minds are dealt with deserves the 
most hearty commendation. This work will be perused w r ith pleasure and 
profit, and most heartily do we commend it to our readers generally.' 

Rock. 

' This is one of the richest volumes of sermons that we have yet had 
from the pen of this eloquent preacher. It is characterised by a mellow- 
ness of thought, a fulness of sympathy, and a glow of style that will awaken 
the highest admiration of all who peruse its pages.' Christian World. 



Henry S. King & Co. London. 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION 
IN THE LIGHT OF THE 
GOSPEL OF LOVE 



BY / 

JAMES BALDWIN BROWN, B.A. 

/ * 

MINISTER OF BRIXTON INDEPENDENT CHURCH 
AUTHOR OF 'THE HOME LIFE ' ' FIRST PRINCIPLES OF ECCLESIASTICAL TRUTH ' 
'THE HIGHER LIFE ' ETC. 



SECOND EDITION 




HENRY S. KING & GO., LONDON 
1875 



(All rights reserved) 



PBEFACE. 



A Christian minister has no need to explain his reasons, 
in these days, for directing the attention of his congrega- 
tion to the subject of the following discourses. It is in 
itself of absorbing interest ; and it is occupying so deeply 
the minds of thoughtful Christian men and women, that 
the full consideration of it has become imperative. 

At the same time, I should not have taken it up just 
at this moment, when the time and the strength which I 
can give to it are limited, but that I happened quite 
recently to be in the chair, as Chairman for the year of 
the Board of Congregational Ministers in London, when 
during three successive meetings the subject was very 
earnestly discussed. As Chairman, I took no part in the 
discussion ; indeed, I do not think that large and deep 
theological questions like this are well suited for debate ; 
but I felt bound in honesty, as I could not perfectly accord 
with any of the various views which were advanced, to 



vi 



PKEFACE. 



take the earliest opportunity of stating in my own way 
what and why I believed. 

There can be no question that the doctrine of the 
Annihilation of the Wicked has been making considerable 
progress of late, mainly, I believe, as a refuge from the 
terrible idea of eternal torment. Believing as I do that 
the doctrine of annihilation is a miserable doctrine, and 
seeing that the whole subject is one of profound and 
pressing interest, I felt called to offer to my congregation, 
many of whom I knew to be perplexed and anxious about 
this and kindred questions, such guidance as might be in 
my power, towards the formation of sound views on these 
vital topics of Christian truth. 

But I was by no means prepared, when I announced 
the course of Lectures, for the widespread interest which 
they seem to have excited. That interest is largely due, 
no doubt, to the immense publicity which the Editor of 
the ' Christian World,' with that courage and love of 
free enquiry which have always been conspicuous in the 
conduct of that journal, has accorded to them. At the 
same time the flood of communications, most of them 
kindly and sympathetic, which has poured in upon me, 
and for which I offer to the writers my hearty thanks, 
shows how very deeply the minds of all classes are being 
stirred by these questions, and how impossible it is that 



PEEP ACE. 



vii 



the full and free discussion of them should be long de- 
layed. I am but obeying a very general request in pub- 
lishing these discourses in a more permanent form, with 
such alterations and additions, none of them material, as 
seemed needful ; and I have sent them forth in the hope 
that they may stimulate this free discussion, and help, 
if but a little, not towards the unsettlement, but towards 
the settlement of men's minds on the subject. 

No one can be more conscious than I am of the very 
partial character of the treatment of this great subject 
which I have attempted. It was quite out of my power 
to write a book about it ; bat it appeared to me that 
something might be said within the compass of a mode- 
rately-sized pamphlet, which might awaken and stimulate 
discussion and at the same time shed some light on the 
principles involved. I am sure that many will be disap- 
pointed at the absence of detailed criticism on the pas- 
sages in controversy, and of a fuller treatment of the 
difficulties which beset the question. I can only plead 
that I have done the best in my power within the limits 
which I was compelled to observe; whether that 'best' 
was worth doing the wise public will judge. 

I have endeavoured to gather the main features of the 
doctrine of annihilation from a comparison of a large 
number of the books and the pamphlets of those who 



viii 



PREFACE. 



advocate it. At the same time the process has not been 
without its difficulties. There is no formulated creed of 
the party, and each writer has his own special views on 
many minor, and occasionally on some cardinal, points. I 
am quite prepared to find myself blamed by one and 
another for not including these specialties in my abstracts 
of doctrine. But I have tried honestly to set forth the 
views which pervade and give character to the literature 
of the school ; and as I have always been very careful to 
state the precise form of the doctrines which I assail, 
those who hold them in a modified form are not aimed at 
in my remarks. 

I have stated in a strong form the degraded view of 
man's estate by nature, with which, it seems to me, 
this Literature is everywhere charged. I am quite pre- 
pared to be told by various writers that they entertain 
quite loftier conceptions of man's nature. But when page 
after page is spent in proving that the soul of man and 
the soul of the beast are spoken of in the same terms in 
the Old Testament Scripture, when every passage which 
speaks of man's feebleness and mortality, which describes 
him as 6 dust,' or which is in tune with the lamentation of 
the weak and vain Hezekiah, is placed in the forefront of 
the argument, while the passages which present the nobler 
view find no recognition, these writers must not be sur- 



PKEFACE. ix 

prised if they are credited with the fair conclusions of 
their arguments, and if their system appears to be ' a 
doctrine of degradation 5 to those who believe in man's 
immortality. 

On one point I ow T e a word of explanation to my friend, 
the Eev. S. Minton, who has complained, though in most 
kindly and considerate terms, as all who know him would 
take for granted, that I have not noted the views which 
he and others entertain, as to the possibility of future 
offers of mercy to those who in this life have never had 
the opportunity of hearing the Gospel. I gladly record 
this important modification of the doctrine which I have 
felt myself constrained to characterise in strong terms in 
these Lectures. I was not unaware of the fact that, here 
and there in the writings of the party, passages might be 
found which appear to open this larger hope. But I must 
add, in justice to myself, that there is no hint of it in the 
long and able address in which for two hours Mr. Minton 
expounded his views, in June last, to a large public 
meeting held in Chelsea Vestry Hall for the purpose of 
their exposition, and at which the Eev. Edward White 
occupied the chair. I cannot therefore take blame to 
myself for not having dealt with it as an important feature 
of the doctrine of the party. May the number of those 
who think with Mr. Minton be speedily multiplied ! 

a 



X 



PEEFACE. 



I have received a very large number of books, pam- 
phlets, and communications of all sorts, during the de- 
livery of these Lectures. They are quite too numerous 
for me to acknowledge and answer individually. May I 
take the opportunity of begging those who sent them to 
accept my very hearty thanks. 

J. Baldwin Brown. 

Kent Villa, 

Brixton Kill, April 1875. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. . i 

The Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save 
them. — Luke ix. 56. 



II. THE DOCTRINE OF EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT . 22 

His mercy is everlasting. — Psalm e. 5. 

III. THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION IN THE LIGHT 

OF MAN'S NATURE, EXPERIENCE, AND HISTORY 52 

He is not a God of the dead, but of the living : for all live 
unto Him. — Luke xx. 38. 



IV. THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION IN THE LIGHT 
OF GOD'S CHARACTER AND METHODS IN THE 
GOVERNMENT OF MANKIND ..... 80 

God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world ; but 
that the world through Him might be saved. — John iii. .17- 



V. THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 106 

For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He 
might destroy the works of the devil. — 1 John iii. 8. 



THE 

DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION 

IN THE LIGHT OF 

THE GOSPEL OP LOVE. 



I. 

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. 

The Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. 
Luke ix. 56. 

It would be difficult for me to give full expression to the 
sense which I entertain, of the gravity of the subject on 
which I have undertaken to address you. The question 
of the destiny of the impenitent, when they pass beyond 
the veil of death, is being, and is likely to be, increasingly 
pressed upon the thoughtful consideration of those who 
care to think about their creed in the Christian Church, 
both by the character and the tendency of the intellectual 
activity of our times, whose atmosphere we breathe, and 
whose influences we take in at every pore, and by the 
ideas which have become dominant in the constitution 
and the development of modern society. The doctrine of 
the eternal torment of those who die in sin is the point 

B 



2 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. 



on which the medieval theology is most visibly and hope- 
lessly breaking down. For it has now, blessed be God, 
become simply incredible to all who care to exercise their 
minds and their hearts — which are equally needed — about 
Divine things, that the God who has given to us the 
measure of His love to the world on Calvary, can bring 
into existence, generation after generation, countless my- 
riads of free intelligent beings, capable of enduring the 
intensest suffering, with the clear certainty that the vast 
mass of them must spend an undying existence in fearful 
anguish ; for want of saving faith in a Gospel which few 
of them were permitted to listen to, and which still fewer 
of them had a chance of hearing, as Christ would have 
proclaimed it, in the full power of its love and of its truth. 

The Calvinistic theology, which inherits from the 
Augustinian, with a- most momentous difference which I 
shall have to indicate, hangs together very firmly. But 
it is breaking down at every point save one, its grand 
central affirmation, which was the strength in which its 
disciples fought and won the battle of liberty in England, 
and largely in Europe, during the last three centuries, 
and by which it strikes its root very deeply into the truth 
of Grod. But this dogma, which I have undertaken to 
consider in this brief series of discourses, stands forth with 
peculiar prominence, inasmuch as it involves consequences 
of tremendous moment to the character and the govern- 
ment of God on the one hand, and to the destiny of the 
great mass of mankind on the other. 



PEELIMINAEY COKSIDEEATIONS. 



3 



Both the heart and the intellect of the Christian 
Church have been educated, to an extent of which they 
have been little conscious, during the past generation, 
by that rationalism which they so expressively mistrust, 
and that spirit of scientific enquiry which they so insanely 
dread. And it now seems clear, at least to the thoughtful 
in the Christian community, whom the thoughtless follow 
in time, that the Church may no longer dare to present in 
the forefront of its Grospel, the vision of the great mass of 
mankind, the men and the women for whom Christ died, 
and whom on Calvary He gathered to His heart, passing 
out after a sad, struggling, sobbing life, into a great waste 
of eternal darkness, where ' iveeping and wailing and 
gnashing of teeth ' burden the shuddering air for ever 
and for ever. The Church has for ages kept this vision 
studiously before the eyes of men, as a powerful means of 
impressing and terrifying the ungodly, and of driving 
them by fear to seek safety within the only fold. But 
the time has come when it must be closed ; it is too 
horrible ; it presents the Grod of Mercy as a fierce, hard 
tyrant ; and it buries behind a murky cloud the radiance 
of that love which trod with weary, bleeding feet the path 
to Calvary, and there by one mighty, living sacrifice, 
made Life triumphant over Death for ever, destroyed the 
works of the devil, and abolished his accursed reign. 

The old doctrine of our stern theology has long been 
doomed ; but during the last few years, through the flood 
of rational light which has been poured upon our theo- 

B 2 



4 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. 



logical systems, the decay of belief in it has been 
remarkably rapid. I am, I confess, amazed at the 
rapidity with which the ideas of the thoughtful in our 
churches on this great subject have been modified, if 
modified is the right word to employ. It rather seems 
to me as if our people, the young especially, had been cut 
adrift from their old moorings, and were floating hither 
and thither aimlessly on the currents, in no small danger 
of making shipwreck of faith, and of becoming an easy 
prey to indifTerentism or despair. Two theories of extri- 
cation from a position which has become intolerable, 
present themselves, and are challenging the attention of 
the faithful, which, for the sake of brevity and distinct- 
ness, we must call Annihilationism and Universalism ; 
though 6 ism 5 is a termination much to be dreaded by 
all who seek to know the truth in Him who is the Truth, 
whereby the soul is made strong and free. 

I know that there are those whose opinion would 
justly carry the greatest weight, who believe that, before 
many years have passed by, the whole body of Evangelical 
believers will be either Annihilationists or Universalists* 
I do not share the opinion — I am neither an Annihilationist 
nor a Universalist, nor do I think that I can ever become 
either the one or the other. I do not think that the 
materials are within our reach to formulate a dogmatic 
belief about ' the last things.' The Annihilationist seems 
to me to depreciate miserably man's constitution and 
experience on the one hand, and Grod's character and 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. 



5 



methods of government on the other ; while the Univer- 
-salist seems to me to tamper perilously with the freedom 
of man's will and his moral control over his own destiny. 
I believe that a just view may be taken of the future 
development of the universe of spiritual being, which coin- 
cides with neither the one theory nor the other. It may be 
lamentably wanting, in the judgment of many, in the 
elements of dogmatic clearness and certainty ; but it may 
yet express the clearest vision of these unutterable 
mysteries to which it is possible for us to attain under the 
present conditions of our existence, while it places us 
spiritually in a healthy upright attitude before the problem, 
and prepares us for the full solution of it, when we c see 
face to face, and know as even also we are known,' beyond 
the veil of death. This I shall endeavour in the last 
lecture to develop, more in the form of suggestions as to 
the direction in which our thought may most profitably 
exercise itself with regard to these mysteries, than in the 
form of definite dogmatic results, about which all schools 
seem to me too sure. 

I have not been eager to undertake this discussion ; in 
truth, I have rather shrunk from it. It has been my lot 
to face much misconception, and some little obloquy, in 
the earlier days of my ministry, through the necessity 
which seemed to be laid upon me to utter what I be- 
lieved to be the truth, about some of the most vital 
articles of the Christian faith, and especially as to the 
Fatherly relation of Grod to each human soul, and His 



6 



PEEUMINAEY CONSIDERATIONS. 



Fatherly government of the great human world. The present 
argument is but a further development of the ideas which 
seem to me to be involved in the Fatherhood of God. 
But I have no love for the thorny paths of controversy, 
though I have been compelled to tread them. I would 
gladly avoid them if possible. And in this instance I am 
conscious of very limited and imperfect vision in what seems 
to me a very obscure region of knowledge. Others speak 
with a confidence which, the more I study the subject, the 
more forsakes me, as to the exact meaning and bearing 
of passages of Scripture, and as to the harmony of appa- 
rently conflicting statements, upon the subject of the 
destiny of those who die impenitent, in eternity. This 
sense of the limitation of our knowledge of these un- 
speakable mysteries, would be far more perplexing and 
burdensome to me than I find it, but that one object 
shines out most clearly through the gloom. We see 
Jesus ; we see the Lord who died on Calvary reigning on 
the great High Throne, and wielding that power which 
He won by His passion to subdue all things under the 
sceptre of His all-enduring, all-sacrificing love. That 
vision, and blessed be God for the clearness with which it 
is unveiled, must mean blessing, boundless blessing, to the 
great Universe of being — blessing which shall justify love's 
infinite sacrifice, and life's tremendous discipline, to that 
Universe through eternity. 

The considerations to which I have just adverted, and 
others which I need not specify, would have led me to 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. 



7 



abstain from any formal discussion of this subject at this 
moment, but that the time seems to me to have come 
when one cannot be silent, without abdicating one of the 
most sacred of the functions which a congregation has a 
right to expect its pastor and teacher to discharge. 
There is no question here about the wisdom of unsettling 
men's minds upon matters of belief; the unsettling seems 
to be complete. What is needed is some effort to settle 
them again on a broader, firmer, and more Christian basis, 
than that from which they have been driven by the im- 
palpable but irresistible pressure of 6 the light.' The 
belief upon these subjects which was possible, after a 
fashion, a generation ago, is possible no longer ; and the 
question which is being considered by the thoughtful, of 
all theological parties, and in all sections of the Church, 
is, how is the Scripture testimony on these themes to be 
truly read ? This is not a matter on which a Christian 
teacher can be honestly silent. Necessity seems to be laid 
upon me ; therefore I speak. 

And it does appear to me most important, just now, 
that earnest thinkers on these themes should be warned 
against narrow and partial solutions of these great 
problems, which at first sight seem attractive from their 
apparent completeness, and their accordance with a class 
of selected passages from the word of (rod. Nor am I 
deterred by the fact that I am myself without dogmatic 
conclusions to offer to you. It may prove, on closer consi- 
deration, that in our present state the faculty for a full 



8 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. 



apprehension of the truth is wanting, and that the 
materials upon which we might be tempted to dogmatise 
are therefore wisely withheld. We can see but in part, 
and can prophesy but in part, about these great mysteries ; 
it is possible that those who come to you with the con- 
fession that their vision is very limited and their prophecy 
very partial, may be more able than more assured and 
confident teachers to guide you towards the perfect and 
everlasting truth. 

I have called the doctrine of annihilation a miserable 
doctrine. So it seems to me, and so I must characterise 
it. But I beg you not to imagine that I see anything 
weak or timid in the men who hold and proclaim it. 
Many of them are my personal friends, and I hold both 
their intelligence and their courage in honour. I can 
only account to myself for the satisfaction with which 
they seem to rest in this doctrine, by the necessity of 
finding some rational escape from a theological position 
which had become intolerable, in a doctrine which would 
clear the Divine Government of a terrible cloud which 
overshadowed it, on the one hand, while it provided some 
effectual terrors wherewith to overawe the wanton and the 
dissolute, who might otherwise seem to be encouraged in 
sin, on the other. It appears to me that they have left a 
stain upon the Divine Government well nigh as dark as 
that which they have attempted to remove ; and I think 
that they take a dreary view of the function and virtue 
of terror in relation to the higher life and development of 
mankind. 



PKELIMINARY CONSIDEEATIONS. 



9 



Thus much by way of preface. I now proceed to offer 
some preliminary considerations which may serve to clear 
the way for the candid appreciation of the statements 
and arguments which I propose to submit to you. 

And first, let me say an earnest word to those who 
cling tenaciously to the ancient belief, which seems to 
them to be consecrated by the faith of ages, and which 
they take for granted, without much thoughtful study of 
the matter for themselves, is the doctrine of the word of 
God. To cast a shadow of doubt on the orthodox creed 
which has been handed down from generation to genera- 
tion in the Calvinistic schools of Christian thought, that 
the Creator and Euler of men has chosen, by His sovereign 
will, to elect a limited number of our race to eternal life, 
to make them by His grace holy, just, and happy through 
eternity, while the great multitude of mankind, by the 
same sovereign will, are left — I will not open a great 
theological controversy by saying doomed 1 — to bear the 
penalties of sin in the shape of eternal torments — I say, to 
cast a doubt on the truth of this orthodox belief is with 
many whom these words will reach, equivalent to denying 
the truth of the Gospel, and handing over the Ark of Grod 
to the hands of His foes. I would that my words were 
strong enough to induce all such to believe that such a 
Gospel of the God, who is Love, has become incredible. 

1 I have always felt that there was no honest answer to Calvin's re- 
mark, ' Many so present election as to deny that any is reprobated, Imt 
very ignorantly and childishly, since election itself would not stand unless 
opposed to reprobation.' — Inst.. III. 23, i. 



10 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. 



Men in these days, and still more in the future days, 
never can believe it. How it was ever possible that men 
should believe it, I hope to explain in some measure in 
my next discourse. But it is possible no longer, except 
to those who live in the world of their own theological 
dreams. To persist in preaching it, and to insist that 
your teachers shall preach it, is to drive the great world 
to which you preach it into open infidelity. How far the 
world has been already driven into infidelity by the 
preaching of such a Gospel, look round and see. 

The attitude of science with relation to religion, 
which is one of the vital spiritual questions of our times, 
is simply at heart the inevitable protest of the honest 
human intellect, fairly awake and energetic, against a 
narrow, selfish, exclusive, and therefore wholly incredible 
theology. The ideas of the character and methods of the 
Creator and Euler of all these worlds, which our theology 
has proclaimed, have been found impossible of belief in 
the light of free intelligence and human sympathy and 
charity. The result has been a strong current of thought 
and feeling against religion in any form, as a narrowing 
and blinding doctrine, tending to put a veil between a 
man's eyes and the truth. So long as we persist in fight- 
ing for and promulgating incredible dogmas, so long will 
this antagonism to religion in any shape widen and deepen. 
When you Christian people, who love the truth and are 
ready to make large sacrifices to make known the truth 
and to forward its work, give to your fellow-men a Gospel 



PKELIMINAEY CONSIDEKATIONS. 11 

which is in fair harmony with the immutable convictions 
of man's conscience, and the ineradicable instincts of his 
heart, you will witness the revival for which you pine and 
pray. For man was made to believe ; he longs, he pants, 
to believe ; but age after age he is driven into Atheism by 
the falsehoods which are promulgated in the name of the 
Grod of truth, and the cruel wrong to the Creature, which 
is said to be perpetrated by the ordinance of the Grod of love. 

The time has come when, if the schism between 
Christianity and human society is not to be made final 
and complete, you must consent to reconsider the judg- 
ments about Divine and human things, which have been 
handed down to you from ages of strife and confusion, 
in the light of the ideas and habits which belong to our 
time, and which are shaping the form of the future. You 
must suspend the prejudices which make it so hard for 
any new thoughts about Divine truth, thoughts which 
make for harmony and tend to progress, to obtain a fair 
judgment from the intellect and conscience of the Christian 
community. You must let the light of reason play upon 
Eevelation and unveil its meanings, and you must extend 
your sympathy instead of your distrust to all honest- 
hearted men, who are seeking with noble and godly effort 
to find the true harmony of the written word with the 
laws of man's nature, with the constitution of society, 
with the order of Creation, and with the testimony of 
history. You must cease to dishearten and to depress 
them by your doubts and inuendoes, as if they were 



12 



PRELDHXAKY CONSIDERATIONS. 



% 



enemies of the truth of Christ's Gospel, for which Grod 
knows that they would willingly die ; and you must 
sustain, strengthen, and cheer them by your sympathy, 
your help, your prayers, in their endeavours to explore, 
that they may expound, the truth. I wish that I could 
convey to you the intensity of my belief that it depends 
largely on the moral attitude of the 6 orthodox ' believers 
towards such enquiries as these and towards the enquirers, 
whether any honest belief in the great Christian verities 
remains possible for those, whether cultivated or uncul- 
tivated, in this generation, who are not themselves inde- 
pendent students of the word of Grod ; or whether we must 
pass through an age of Atheism, and that dark, moral 
chaos which inevitably issues from it, before we, or rather 
]et us say before our children, come forth to that broad, 
firm continent of truth, righteousness, and charity which, 
since Christ reigns, we know must lie beyond. 

I do not speak for myself. I have borne so much 
opposition and mistrust for speaking what seemed to me 
to be the truth in past years, that I can bear more, if it 
must be, with tolerable patience. I speak for my young 
brethren, whose work is very difficult, whose battle is very 
hard, harder than many of you know, in such times as 
these. Brethren in Christ, let me appeal to you as one 
who has been for a full generation in the very midst of the 
conflict ; do not fire into the troops who are bravely fighting 
your battle ; do not blight with your distrust the men 
who are struggling hard, through many errors and failures 



PEELIMINAEY CONSIDEEATIONS. 



13 



no doubt, but still with honest and truth-loving hearts, 
to discover and disclose the harmonies which must sub- 
sist between the word of Scripture and the deepest needs, 
experiences, and convictions of the great world of men. 

A second consideration which I submit is, that this is 
not a question which can be settled by the quotation of 
isolated texts, and for the settlement of which a formidable 
apparatus of critical scholarship is indispensable. There 
is no stumbling-block more dangerous to a Christian 
thinker than a text torn from its surroundings. The 
formidable array of words of doubtful, or, rather, manifold 
meaning, on the nice interpretation of which the know- 
ledge of the truth of this matter is supposed to depend, 
we can easily imagine may lead an unlearned, simple- 
minded Christian to torment himself with the question, 
How is it possible that I can ever attain in my unlearned 
estate to an intelligent belief upon the subject ? Take it 
for granted that a large question like this does not depend 
for its intelligent settlement upon niceties of expression 
which can be appreciated only by cultivated critics. Be 
sure that the truth of a matter of such tremendous im- 
portance to man depends on principles of the broadest 
and firmest character, the nature and bearings of which 
can be fairly apprehended by all who bring an honest 
and open mind to the enquiry. I have little patience, I 
confess, with the wranglings of many who vainly conceive 
themselves to be critical scholars, as to the precise shade 
of meaning which a word may be supposed to bear in a 



14 



PKELEUINAKY CONSIDERATIONS. 



particular passage of St. Paul. It is a fair question for 
scholars, and it has the greatest interest to scholars ; and 
the settlement of such a point by careful and sound 
scholarship is a matter of importance to theological truth. 
But you may almost count the men in England whose 
authoritative judgment on such a matter is worth any- 
thing at all. And be sure that this is too large a question 
for great critical scholars to settle for us. The meaning of 
the word, the whole witness of the Bible, must be brought 
to expound the difficult and apparently conflicting state- 
ments which seem to bear on the particular issue. It is 
a question for a sound Christian philosophy, based on the 
whole Eevelation, rather than for nice textual criticism ; 
it is a matter, therefore, which the average intellect and 
conscience of Christian men may feel themselves com- 
petent to discuss and to decide, on the evidence furnished 
by the broader statements of Eevelation, as to the nature 
of man, the meaning of life, and the character and pur- 
poses of God. 

I have heard men entering into an elaborate argu- 
ment to prove that the great mass of their fellow-men 
must spend eternity in miserable torment, on the basis of 
the exact shade of meaning with which a Greek word — 
of the mere pronunciation of which they were dismally 
ignorant — is employed in a particular passage ; and I 
have not wondered, as I listened, that the world has been 
content to leave the critics and the word-mongers among 
the theologians, to carry on their controversies at their 



PKELIMINAEY CONSIDEEATIONS. 



15 



leisure, utterly careless of them and their gospel of strife. 
Criticism, which, to be worth anything, must be the work 
of the finest and most cultivated intellects— the small 
critics are like the plague of flies — may bind and cement 
firmly the great stones of the temple of theological truth. 
But the body of the structure must be of the homeliest 
and most substantial stuff, material that common and 
unlearned men can hew and build in. It is wonderful 
how every great Christian belief has grown to its full form 
and power, not by the toil of scholars within closets, but 
by the instincts, the needs, the toils, the struggles, and 
the manifold experiences of simple Christian men and 
women, fighting by God's help the battle and bearing the 
burden of the Christian life. 

I have written during my thirty years' ministry a good 
many theological books. If there is one thing in connec- 
tion with them which I recall with a special thankfulness, 
it is that I have never treated great theological subjects 
-as though they depended mainly on considerations which 
none but accomplished scholars could appreciate. I have 
always been sure that God does not leave matters of the 
largest moment hanging on the exact meaning of obscure 
and difficult words ; and while accepting thankfully the 
judgment of the critics on matters which it lies within 
the province of consummate scholarship to determine, I 
have ever sought to lay on a broader and deeper basis 
than mere textual criticism my arguments on the larger 
theological truths. I shall adopt the same method new. 



16 



PEEUMINAEY CONSIDEEATIONS. 



You will hear little about Grreek words and particles, and 
little about particular texts ; while I shall have much to 
say about the larger meaning and bearing of Eevelation in 
the whole body of Scripture, and of the light in which it 
places man's nature, his life, his burdens, responsibilities, 
and destinies on the one hand, and the mind and the 
methods of God on the other. 

It is deeply important, too, that we should understand 
how perfectly free, frank, and informal are the utterances 
of the Bible on all the great subjects of Christian thought. 
Whatever the Bible may be, it is never 4 doctrinaire.' It 
is nowhere a book of propositions and definitions, or a book 
from which propositions and definitions can be readily 
extracted. It is a book of life for the living, and not a 
book of thought for the philosophers. Its use of language 
is that of conversation rather than of science; and it needs 
for its study that honest intuitive intelligence with which 
we gather the mind of a man from his frank conversation, 
rather than the keen critical acumen with which we look 
into a scientific treatise or a dogmatic creed. It is not 
in the least afraid of contradicting itself in terms in the 
same chapter, and it is full of discords of expression, which 
an honest mind can at once harmonise. There is hardly 
any position which texts may not be found, as far as the 
mere letter is concerned, to sustain. How many stumbling- 
blocks it leaves in the way of faith which would be re- 
moved by a word of explanation ; how many passages it 
offers for errors and heresies to build upon, which we are 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. 



17 



tempted to think a little judicious oversight would have 
expunged. This, its freedom, its simplicity, its frankness, 
its naturalness, is its glory ; but it makes the building-up 
of monstrous doctrines comparatively easy to the text- 
mongers, and necessitates for their confutation a broad 
and spiritual survey of its whole field of truth. And 
further, on themes which are unspeakable in their fulness, 
like this, the Bible deals with us much as we deal with 
children, and presents to us images which do not profess 
to be in formal correspondence with the unseen realities, 
but such as may draw out our latent intelligence to dis- 
cern the truth with increasing clearness, and to grasp the 
whole substance of it bodily at last. 

Much of the intellectual basis of the theory of human 
destinies which I am opposing, seems to me to consist of 
what I cannot but call an idolatry of the words of the 
Bible as distinguished from its word ; that is, the deter- 
mination to fix certain finely- drawn shades of meaning to 
words and phrases in particular passages of the Scriptures, 
and to make them the basis of doctrine, when it is mani- 
fest to those who take a larger view of inspiration, that 
those words and phrases are used freely, and are to be 
interpreted in the harmony of the whole deliverance of 
the Bible on the themes of which they treat. When our 
Lord said that His apostles should sit on twelve thrones 
judging the twelve tribes of Israel, we arrive at what He 
meant by not adhering too literally to what He said. 
Paul, accusing himself as the chief of sinners, could easily 

c 



18 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. 



be convicted of mock humility or hypocrisy by those who 
insisted on a precise interpretation of the apostle's words. 
You must judge the words by the word of his whole life 
and writings, and you will arrive at a sustaining and 
stimulating truth. Emphatically are those passages in 
which our Lord speaks of His own nature and claim to 
the obedience of mankind, subject to this law of inter- 
pretation: neglecting to observe it, we should arrive 
at strange and startling results. 

The Bible, too, may be found, as any wise man may 
sometimes be found, when he is speaking freely and 
earnestly, and with a view to impress and stir up his 
fellow-men, treating of great themes in terms which seem 
logically inconsistent or oppugnant. There are passages 
in the Bible on all the great subjects of Christian thought 
which seem to look one way, and other passages which 
seem to look another, according to the state of thought 
and feeling out of which they were spoken, or to which 
they were addressed. Interpret them with rigid logical 
accuracy, bring the half-closed critical eye to bear upon 
them, and it would be easy to convict the Bible of start- 
ling inconsistencies ; bring the open eye to bear upon 
them, the eye that seeks the light, light to live by, and 
the very varieties and contradictions disclose a larger and 
fairer world of truth. 

The last preliminary consideration which I offer, con- 
cerns the influence of terror on the spiritual condition 
and development of mankind. There are many kinds of 



PEELIMINAEY CONSIDEEATIONS. 



19 



fear and many fruits of fear. There is a fear which is 
purifying and ennobling ; the fear of a child lest he should 
grieve a parent, of a friend lest he should wound a friend. 
There is a fear which has more of awe than of love in it ; 
this fear made Israel tremble, though with no debasing 
terror, when they stood before the splendours and the 
wonders of Sinai, and it prepared them to hear the Divine 
commandment and live. It is the fear of Grod which the 
Saviour teaches His disciples to blend with the trust and 
love which His mission inspires. Again, there is a fear 
which is mainly slavish, the fear of pain, or of the loss of 
pleasure, the dread of torment, of the lash and the chain. I 
do not say that when men are sunk utterly in slavish bond- 
age to sin, dull of ear, dead of heart, to all the higher 
influences that can appeal to spirits, its ministry as a 
rough apparitor to the careless, thriftless conscience, can 
be wholly dispensed with. But I do say that the trust of 
Christendom in the terror of hell through all these ages 
has been faithless and degrading, and has had a chief 
share in producing that dreary indifference to the claims 
of Christ and of His Gospel, that blindness to the reali- 
ties of the higher world, which after eighteen centuries 
of Christian teaching and influence the Church has so 
bitterly to deplore. 

There are multitudes who cling to the terror of the 
mediaeval doctrine, because they think that they may not 
dare let go an instrument of incomparable power, in their 
judgment, to arrest the sinner, as they call it, and drive 

c 2 



20 



PKELIMIXAKY CONSIDERATIONS. 



him into the fold. 6 And I, if I be lifted up from the 
earth, will draw all men unto Me,' said the Saviour, as He 
entered on His Passion. Ah ! Lord, we are legalists and 
terrorists still; still we slight the sacrifice, still we distrust 
the love. But we have had hell paraded in its full dress 
of horrors in Christendom for ages. The flesh creeps, the 
very marrow shivers in the bones, before the ghastly pictures 
of anguish, of tortured, maddened, hopeless souls, in which 
poets, painters, and preachers have revelled ; flashing the 
flames of hell in the face of the sinner to terrify him and 
drive him to Grod. Look round at the result. Look at our 
intellectual class ; look at our artisan class ; look at our 
peasant class ; and ask yourselves, Christian men and 
women, is it not time to begin to think about ' a more ex- 
cellent way ? ■ Can anything be sadder than the condition 
in which Christendom is stranded after all these ages, in 
which the pit has been trusted as a mightier instrument 
of conversion than the tale of Calvary, the flames of 
hell than the Kedeemer's tears and blood? 

Shake yourselves free, I beseech you, from this clinging 
to the terror of judgment ; that was not 'the terror of the 
Lord 5 which moved St. Paul to persuade men. The 
sighing and the moaning of souls in anguish, is not the 
power of Grod unto the salvation of those who are perish- 
ing in sin. Make free way for the Grospel of the Love, 
I beseech you ; the Love in all that awful holy power 
which the sacrifice of Calvary unveils. Let it have 
free course, as it has never yet had free course in 



PEELIMINAEY CONSIDEKATIONS. 



21 



Christendom, and see how swiftly the joyful power will 
burst forth for the conquest of the world. Let us preach 
in all the fulness of His redeeming mercy, 6 Christ Jesus, 
and Him crucified ; ' who came, and lived, and died, 
4 not to destroy men's lives, but to save them ; ' and who 
is, and must be, the power of God unto salvation to every 
soul that is saved in the wide Universe, now, and through 
eternity. 6 To whom be glory and majesty, dominion 
and power, throughout all ages, world without end. 
Amen. 5 



22 THE DOCTKINE OF EVERLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 



II. 

THE DOCTRINE OF EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT. 

His mercy is everlasting. — Psalm c. o. 

The tenacity with which the Church has clung to the 
doctrine of the everlasting punishment of the wicked, 
and the submission with which the Christian world has 
accepted it, bear a very solemn and impressive testimony 
to the power which the ' conscience of sins ' wields over 
the experiences, the beliefs, and the previsions of man- 
kind. Without this dread reality in man's consciousness 
to rest upon, this awful dogma could never have reached 
the place which it has occupied in the system of Christian 
thought. Kb sick dreams of a morbid imagination, no 
bugbear dressed up and held forth in the interest of a 
priesthood, could have sustained this tremendous belief 
though all these Christian ages, and given to it a hold 
which it is hard to shake over multitudes of the most 
loving, compassionate, and yearning Christian hearts. 
Nothing but an overwhelming sense of the reality and the 
misery of sin, reaching to the roots of the being and mingled 
with all its experiences, could make it for a moment 
credible to man, that the sin of a little span of a fleeting 



THE DOCTKINE OP EVEKLASTING PUNISHMENT. 23 



life which, is born with the taint of corruption, could draw 
on itself the sentence of unutterable torment through 
never-ending ages, under the judgment of a Grod who 
blends infinite tenderness with absolute righteousness in 
every decree. 

It is the inward anguish which makes the outward 
sentence in any wise credible. Sin, despite the softening 
pleas and the mitigating suggestions of the philosopher, 
remains the chronic agony of man and of the world. That 
sense of guilt must needs have hold on man in the inner- 
most core of his being, which wrings from his agonised 
heart the cry, 6 Shall I give my first-born for my trans- 
gression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? ' 
and which leads him in all countries and in all ages, in 
various ways, to offer up that which is dearer to him than 
dear life, that a righteousness higher than his own may 
receive what he dreams will be a satisfaction, and that 
the awful barrier which guilt raises between his soul 
and Grod, may be cast down and for ever destroyed. No 
dream, sick or sound, brought that idea of sacrifice into 
man's imagination; no terror wielded by a priest can 
explain one tithe of the moral dread and anguish of man- 
kind. 

Christianity did not put that sense of miserable sin 
and shameful guilt into man's spirit ; Christianity found 
it there, and proclaimed the sacrifice wherein the Divine 
Love offered a Divine Life on Calvary, as the propitia- 
tion for man's guilt, because nothing but an atonement 



24 THE DOCTRINE OF EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT. 



offered by God, and therefore sufficient before God, can 
furnish, the basis of a vital reconciliation between Himself 
and the guilty transgressor, in view of the deeper experi- 
ences of life and eternity. Man, when agonising under 
the sense of sin, is ready to believe any dark truth about 
the issue of sin, for he feels the worm already gnawing, 
and the fire already scorching and blasting within. But 
man's estimate of his desert, or even his real desert, is not 
the measure or the rule of God's dispensations of mercy. 
Paul once felt himself i the chief of sinners;' but if God 
had taken him and dealt with him as the chief of sinners, 
a great shadow would have fallen over the Eighteousness 
as well as over the Love. 

Belief in eternal torment becomes possible through 
the terrible anguish of the sin-stricken spirit ; the pit 
which sin has opened in every guilty human heart. The 
sinner, in the agony of conviction, needs no worse pit 
than he finds within. 

But the prominence of the doctrine and its ghastly 
surroundings, are due very largely to the deliberate and 
persistent policy of the Church. I mean by the Church, 
all Churches — the ancient Church, the mediaeval Latin 
Church ; the reformed Churches, and the modern Eoman, 
or, as we must now call it, the Papal Church. AVhen I 
use the word policy, I do not employ it in a sinister sense. 
I believe that the policy has been mainly honest, however 
mistaken, though to a terrible extent it has been made 
to replenish the coffers of selfish and grasping priests. 



THE DOCTRINE OF EVEELASTING PUNISHMENT. 25 



But all Churches have put their trust largely in terror ; I 
believe that I may say with entire truth, that in Christ- 
endom, through all the Christian ages, the terror, as an 
instrument of Christian influence, has quite eclipsed the 
love. I do not address myself in these discourses to theo- 
logical experts. I adopt nothing of the scholastic tone. 
The subject has been stifled by the cloud of words and 
the dust of word-chopping, which critics, great and small, 
have raised around it. I shall deal, as far as possible, 
with considerations which quite uncritical persons can 
appreciate. The men had little time or skill to mani- 
pulate subtle and recondite meanings, who heard the 
words of Christ or read the Epistles of St. Paul. One 
broad simple proof that terror rather than love has been 
supreme in Europe in the conception of Christ's relation 
to the world, that the office of the Judge has obscured the 
mission of the Saviour, is to be found in the rapid spread 
and the intense fervour of Mariolatry. What, looking at 
it in a broad way, does the worship of the Virgin mean ? 
It means that the Saviour has become increasingly asso- 
ciated with ideas of judgment, not of compassion ; and so 
men devise and set forth a woman as a mediator with 
Jesus, that they may re-open through a woman those 
springs of tenderness which, but for the woman, they 
think would be well-nigh closed in the merciful Re- 
deemer's heart ! 

The Church, then, has adopted the policy of terror. 
Her hierarchy, her ordained ministers, have made it their 



26 THE DOCTKIXE OP EVEKLASTMG PUNISHMENT. 



business to let men hear the swish of the lash and the 
clank of the chain. Bat they have not invented the idea, 
they have not devised the doctrine and foisted it into the 
Scriptures and the creed of the Church. No ; the early 
and mediaeval theologians believed that they found it in 
the Bible, and well might believe that they found it there, 
if they were content to dwell on one passage, or one class 
of passages, and to explain other passages and classes of 
passages summarily away. Those acquainted at all with 
early Church literature will know how absolutely decisive 
the passage, 6 and these shall go away into eternal punish- 
ment, but the righteous into life eternal,' seemed to the 
vast majority of the writers of those times. St. Augustine, 
who had about as clear an intellect, and as keen an insight 
into words, as has ever been granted to man, speaks on 
this passage with unhesitating certainty. He affirms that 
the two clauses must be interpreted in the same sense, 
that if the bliss is everlasting so must the torment be. 
And he is the mouthpiece here of the Church of his time, 
and of the whole mediaeval period through which, with 
more or less of supremacy, his intellect ruled. I have 
read many ingenious arguments to prove that punishment 
here means annihilation, and that everlasting is therefore 
a rhetorical superfluity ; and I have read them with the 
conviction that it is possible for very clever gentlemen to 
do almost anything with words, provided they may pick 
out of several senses in which a word is used, that which 
suits their theology, and may insist that this is the mean- 



THE DOCTKINE OE EVEELASTINGr PUNISHMENT. 27 



ing which must be put upon it in the particular passage 
under discussion, the whole drift of which may set quite 
the other way. 

But there is another class of passages which meet us 
in both Testaments, which seem to preach a widely differ- 
ent doctrine. The texts in the Old Testament which de- 
clare that God's mercy is everlasting, that He will not 
keep His anger for ever, that He loves with an everlasting- 
love a people as full of follies, of sins, of idolatries, as any 
people known to history, are numerous and emphatic. 
Again, the passage in the New Testament (Matt. xii. 
31-2) 1 about a sin never being forgiven either in this 
world or in the world that is to come, seems to lose all but 
an unworthy rhetorical meaning, if forgiveness is a thing 

1 I quote this passage with hesitation, as the meaning which the word 
translated ' world ' is meant to bear is exceedingly doubtful ; but the argu- 
ment is valid against those who hold that ' the world to come ' is the eternal 
state, and who deny the possibility of forgiveness after death. Neither 
Mark nor Luke convey this precise idea in their version of the saying ; and 
the language in Mark is, perhaps, suggestive of some modification of the 
absoluteness of the sentence as recorded by Matthew. May not the words 
of Christ, ' With God all things are possible,' with relation to a kindred 
difficulty (Matt. xix. 24-6), suggest the principle on which we may stop 
short of a hopeless interpretation of these terrible warning words ? The 
language of our Lord about Judas, ' Grood were it for that man if he had 
never been born,' is often regarded as decisive of the endless as well as the 
terrible character of the punishment to which he doomed himself. But 
nothing can be more unsafe than to draw doctrinal conclusions from vivid 
and intense descriptions like this, of what was meant to be regarded as a 
matchless misery ; while the fact that our Saviour uses this terrible language 
of this unique crime, seems to forbid our application of it, as it is applied 
by annihilationist as well as orthodox theologians, to the future condition of 
a great multitude of our race. 



28 THE DOCTKINE OF EVEKLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 



quite beyond possibility in that 6 world which is to come/ 
Again, the question which is raised in another remarkable 
passage about punishment with few stripes or with many 
stripes (Luke xii. 47-8) seems an utterly idle one to a 
soul condemned to an eternity of suffering. The utter 
hopelessness of the lot is the horror ; what is a stripe more 
or less to a soul shut out from light, from life, from love, 
from Grod, for ever. Again, there is a passage which seems 
precisely as clear, as explicit as that on the 6 eternal 
punishment ' and the 6 life eternal,' spoken by Christ in 
the most solemn moment of His life, when He was enter- 
ing the cloud of the last agony, 'And J, if I be lifted up 
from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.' (John xii. 
32.) Words can hardly seem plainer, and certainly could 
not be spoken under more awful obligations to plainness ; 
but, again, clever critics take them and manipulate them, 
and explain to us that they mean something quite different 
from what they appear to express. I am not attempting 
to construct a harmony here. I shall have something to 
say about the relations of such passages in future lectures ; 
that is, as far as I see light about them. But here are 
clearly two classes of passages ; and my present concern is 
to beg you to note that the Church has through these 
eighteen centuries elected to stand by the one and not by 
the other, as the true key to the doctrine of our Lord. 
She has chosen the passage in Matthew xxv., which it is 
manifest, from the points on which the judgment hinges, 
is limited in its scope, as the central passage on which the 



THE DOCTKINE OF EVEKLASTING PUNISHMENT. 29 

doctrine turns ; and all passages which appeared to con- 
tain conflicting doctrine have been forced into harmony 
with it. And she has adopted into her system the whole 
horror of the suggestion of verse 41. 'The everlasting 
fire, prepared for the devil and his angels ; 5 she has 
accepted to the full the hints rather than the descriptions 
of torment, wherewith the Scriptures, in their graphic, 
homely way, clothe and present a terrible spiritual fact ; 
and the literature of the Church has been charged with 
horrors from the first days of the hierarchical order of 
things until now. And why? Because she felt it su- 
premely important to have the means of successfully 
terrifying men. That she felt it honestly in the main 
there can be no question; though, as I have said, the doc- 
trine has been awfully prostituted to make a thriving 
trade for priests. 

I have no intention of discussing the patristic doctrine 
of torment. I might cull terrible and harrowing pictures 
enough from writers of the first eminence, to prove how 
from the first the torments of hell have been elaborately 
set forth before the eyes of Christendom as an essential 
doctrine of Christianity, and the name of the God of Love 
has been thereby systematically blasphemed. Think, I 
beseech you, what kind of Christianity Christendom has 
lived through ; and while you wonder at its vitality, 
wonder not that it is still ' as a voice crying in the 
wilderness ' to a heedless and scoffing world. One pas- 
sage I must quote from Augustine, setting forth the nobler 



30 THE DOCTKINE OF EVEKLASTING PUNISHMENT. 

view which the smoke of the pit has been suffered to 
eclipse. In a remarkable treatise he says : 6 To perish 
from the kingdom of God, to be an exile from the city of 
(rod, to be an alien from the life of God ; to want " so 
great multitude of God's sweetness which He hath laid up 
for them that fear Him, and hath wrought for them that 
hope in Him," is so great a punishment, that no torment 
that we know can be compared to it, if it be eternal, and 
they continue through how many ages soever. There will 
therefore continue without end that eternal death of the 
damned, that is, alienation from the life of God; and 
itself will be common to all, whatever men according to 
their human feelings may imagine concerning variety of 
human punishment, or concerning relief or intermission 
of pain ; 1 as the eternal life of the saints will remain in 
common the life of all, in whatever distinction of honour 
they may harmoniously shine.' 6 Enchiridion,' c. 112. 

But nothing short of horrible physical torture would 
serve the purpose of the Church for the terrifying of men, 
and so visions and pictures of agonising torments abound. 
Literature and art alike groan with horrors throughout the 
Middle Age, relieved, however, somewhat by a grotesque 
humour, which seems to suggest that writers and painters 
had some thoughts in the background as to the reality 
of the loathsome scenes which they pourtrayed. Baeda 

1 He had spoken above of the possibility that the pains of the damned 
might at certain intervals of time be in some measure mitigated, since Grod 
did not altogether ' shut up His tender mercy." 



THE DOCTEINE OF EVEBLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 31 



gives us two very remarkable narratives, on which I dwell 
for a moment, inasmuch as they strike the key-note of 
much of the mediaeval thought upon the subject. Not 
that they by any means open the train of thought and 
representation ; we should have to go much further back 
than Bseda, and to dig deeply into the underlying stratum 
of heathen beliefs and traditions, for the fons et origo 
malorum ; but these visions which Baeda records take up 
the key-note clearly, and prelude the great mediaeval 
poem, the ' Divina Commedia,' in which this dark and sad 
theology—dark and sad as the times — culminated, and 
from which we must date the first stirrings of the Keform- 
ation. 

One passage describes the vision of the blessed Abbot 
Fursey; which those who care to read it will find in 
b. iii., ch. 19 of the 6 Ecclesiastical History.' I do not 
quote it here, as it is less striking than that of one 
Drithelm, who was said to have risen from the dead, 
and who, unlike another in similar dread relation, 

Who told it not; or something seal'd 
The lips of that Evangelist, 

gave a most particular and terrible account of what he 
beheld. The vision is remarkable because it presents thus 
early, in the seventh century, though in rude coarse form, 
the outline which is filled in with such terrible power in 
the visions of the 6 Inferno'; where horror is piled on 
horror in the pictures of the torments of the wicked; 



32 THE DOCTEINE OF EVEKLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 

where popes and princes writhe in intolerable anguish 
in forms which it would task the most weird imagination 
of the painter to pourtray, and where 

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi eh' entrate, 

is written over the gate of hell. The vision is as follows : — 
6 Thus he related what he had seen : " He that led me 
had a shining countenance and a bright garment, and we 
went on silently, as I thought, towards the north-east. 
Walking on, we came to a vale of great breadth and depths 
but of infinite length; on the left it appeared full of 
dreadful flames ; the other side was no less horrid, for 
violent hail and cold snow were flying in all directions ; 
both places were full of men's souls, which seemed by turns 
to be tossed from one side to the other, as it were by a 
violent storm; for when the wretches could no longer 
endure the excess of heat, they leaped into the middle of 
the cutting cold ; and finding no rest there, they leaped 
back again into the middle of the unquenchable flames. 
Now whereas an innumerable multitude of deformed 
spirits were thus alternately tormented far and near, as 
far as could be seen, without any intermission, I began 
to think that this perhaps might be hell, of whose in- 
tolerable flames I had often heard talk. My guide, who 
went before me, answered to my thought, saying, 6 Do not 
believe so, for this is not the hell you imagine.' 

6 " When he had conducted me, much frightened with 
that horrid spectacle, by degrees, to the further end, on a 



THE DOCTKINE OF EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT. 33 



sudden I saw the place begin to grow dusk and filled with 
darkness. When I came into it, the darkness, by degrees, 
grew so thick that I could see nothing besides it and the 
shape and garment of him that led me. As we went on 
through the shades of night, on a sudden there appeared 
before us frequent globes of black flames, rising as it were 
out of a great pit, and falling back again into the same. 
When I had been conducted thither, my leader suddenly 
vanished, and left me alone in the midst of darkness and 
this horrid vision, whilst those same globes of fire, with- 
out intermission, at "one time flew up and at another fell 
back into the bottom of the abyss ; and I observed that 
all the flames, as they ascended, were full of human souls, 
which, like sparks flying up with smoke, were sometimes 
thrown on high, and again, when the vapour of the fire 
ceased, dropped down into the depth below. Moreover, 
an insufferable stench came forth with the vapours and 
filled all those dark places. 

' " Having stood there a long time in much dread, not 
knowing what to do, which way to turn, or what end I 
might expect, on a sudden I heard behind me the noise 
of a most hideous and wretched lamentation, and at the 
same time a loud laughing, as of a rude multitude insult- 
ing captured enemies. When that noise, growing plainer, 
came up to me, I observed a gang of evil spirits dragging 
the howling and lamenting souls of men into the midst of 
the darkness, whilst they themselves laughed and rejoiced. 
Among those men, as I could discern, there was one shorn 

D 



34 THE DOCTRINE OF EVERLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 



like a clergyman, a layman, and a woman. The evil 
spirits that dragged them went down into the midst of 
the burning pit ; and as they went down deeper, I could 
no longer distinguish between the lamentation of the men 
and the laughing of the devils, yet I still had a confused 
sound in my ears. In the meantime some of the dark 
spirits ascended from that flaming abyss, and running 
forward beset me on all sides, and much perplexed me 
with their glaring eyes and the stinking fire which pro- 
ceeded from their mouths and nostrils ; and threatened to 
lay hold on me with burning tongs,* which they had in 
their hands, yet they durst not touch me, though they 
frightened me. Being thus on all sides enclosed with 
enemies and darkness, and looking about on every side 
for assistance, there appeared behind me, on the way that 
I came, as it were, the brightness of a star shining amidst 
the darkness, which increased by degrees and came rapidly 
towards me. When it drew near, all those evil spirits 
that sought to carry me away with their tongs dispersed 
and fled." '— Bseda, ' Eccl. Hist.' b. v. c. 2. 

But we will not linger over mediaeval horrors. For a 
reason which I shall presently dwell upon, it is since the 
Reformation that the doctrine has been set forth in its 
most dread and ghastly aspect, with absolutely no relief 
to its pitiless cruelty — and all in the name and for the 
honour of the God who 6 is Love.' 

I doubt whether in any age of theological literature 
the doctrine has been brought out with such ruthless 



THE DOCTRINE OF EVEKLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 35 

consistency as by President Edwards, from whose writings 
I quote some passages that we may see how the doctrine 
looks, divested of its sacerdotal and clothed in its Calvin- 
istic dress. In one passage he says : i The judge of that 
day will not mix mercy with justice. The time for mercy 
to be shewn to sinners will then be past. Christ will then 
appear in another character than that of a merciful Sa- 
viour. Having laid aside the inviting aspect of grace and 
mercy, He will clothe himself with justice and vengeance. 
He will not only in general exact of sinners the demand 
of the law, but He will exact the whole without any abate- 
ment, He will exact the very uttermost farthing. (Matt, 
v. 26.) Then Christ will come to fulfil that in Eev. xiv. 
10: "The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath 
of God, which is poured out without mixture, into the 
cup of His indignation." The punishment threatened to 
ungodly men is without any pity (Ezek. v. 11) : "Neither 
shall Mine eye spare, neither will I have any pity." Here 
all judges have a mixture of mercy, but the wrath of God 
will be poured out upon the wicked without mixture, and 
vengeance will have its full weight. 5 1 

Again : ' We can conceive but little of the matter. 
We cannot conceive what the sinking of the soul in such 
a case is. But, to help your conception, imagine yourself 
to be cast into a fiery oven, all of a glowing heat, or into 
the midst of a glowing brick-kiln or of a great furnace 



1 Vol. iii. p. 221. Ed. New York, 1844. 
d 2 



36 THE DOCTRINE OF EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT. 

where your pain would be as much greater than that oc- 
casioned by accidentally touching a coal of fire, as the 
heat is greater. Imagine also that your body were to lie 
there for a quarter of an hour, full of fire, as full within 
and without as a bright coal of fire, all the while full of 
quick sense : what horror would you feel at the entrance 
of such a furnace ! and how long would that quarter of 
an hour seem to you ! If it were to be measured by a 
glass, how long would the glass seem to be running ! 
And after you had endured it for a minute, how over- 
bearing would it be to you to think that you had to en- 
dure it the other fourteen ! 

' But what would be the effect on your soul if you 
knew that you must lie there enduring that torment to 
the full for twenty-four hours ! and how much greater 
the effect if you knew that you must endure it for a 
whole year ! And how vastly greater still, if you knew 
that you must endure it for a thousand years ! Oh, then, 
how would your heart sink, if you thought, if you knew 
that you must bear it for ever and ever ! That there 
would be no end ; thai after millions and millions of ages 
your torment would be no nearer to an end than ever it 
was ; and that you never, never should be delivered ! But 
your torment in hell will be immensely greater than this 
illustration represents.' 1 

Again, that we may see the whole ghastly shape of 



1 Vol. iii. p. 260. 



THE DOCTBINE OF EVEELASTING PUNISHMENT. 27 



the doctrine : 6 The sight of hell torments will exalt the 
happiness of the saints for ever. It will not only make 
them more sensible of the greatness and freeness of the 
•Grace of God in their happiness, but it will really make 
their happiness the greater, as it will make them more 
sensible of their own happiness ; it will give them a more 
lively relish of it, it will make them prize it more. When 
they see others who were of the same nature, and born 
under the same circumstances, plunged in such misery, 
and they so distinguished, it will make them sensible 
how happy they are. A sense of the opposite misery 
in any case greatly increases the relish of any joy or 
pleasure.' 1 And this was once preached as a Gospel ! As 
to the bearing of this vision of horrors on the Divine 
character and ways, Edwards plainly says : ' Is not God 
worthy to have the same right with respect to the gifts 
of His Grace that a man has with regard to his money 
or his goods? . . . God may justly show greater respect 
to others than to you, for you have shewn greater respect 
to others than to God. 5 4 Thou thoughtest that I was 
altogether such an one as thyself might well be the 
Divine rebuke to such a theology. 

Calvin writes to the same purpose, though in a loftier 
strain : ' As the Lord by the efficacy of His calling 
accomplishes towards His elect the salvation to which He 
had by His eternal counsel destined them, so He has 



1 Vol. iii. p. 276. 



38 THE DOCTRINE OE EVERLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 

jndgments against the reprobate, by which. He executes 
His counsel concerning thern. Those, therefore, whom 
He has created for dishonour during life and destruction 
at death, that they may be vessels of wrath and examples 
of severity in bringing to their doom, He at one time 
deprives of the means of hearing His word, at another 
by the preaching of it blinds and stupefies them the 
more.' 1 

Elsewhere he says, with a touch of human pity : ' I 
again ask, how is it that the fall of Adam involves so many 
nations with their infant children in eternal death without 
remedy, unless that it so seemed meet to Grod? The 
decree, I admit, is horrible.' 2 On which it is enough to 
say, that the time is far past when men can bring them- 
selves to believe in a Grod who gives forth what His 
advocates are compelled to confess are horrible decrees. 

The idea of terrible physical torment has lived on to 
our times. One of the very ablest of the theologians of 
the last generation, a most courageous yet gentle and 
meek-hearted man, in his theological lectures, points out 
that oceans of fire are seething beneath us which may be 
put to these uses ; and he suggests that the bodies of the 
lost in the eternal state may undergo modifications of 
structure, so as to be suscejDtible of more terrible agony 
through the action of fire than any of which we here can 
dream. These pages will be read by many who can 



1 Inst, book iii. c. xxiv. § 12. 



2 Book iii. c. xxiii. § 7. 



THE DOCTKINE OF EVEKLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 39 



remember that in the days of their childhood their hands 
were held to scorch before the fire as a key to hell 
torments, and as a prelude to the preaching of the Grospel 
of infinite pity and love. And the extreme Anglican 
party in our day seem bent on reviving all the loathsome 
mediaeval horrors. Torment is the priest's scourge, which 
he wields in all ages with ruthless severity : winning 
power for his office for the moment by murdering the 
truth of the Grospel, and blighting at the roots all possi- 
bility of manly faith in the generation which submits 
itself to his sway. But here the doctrine of priestly 
absolution must be taken as its pendant. The Church 
has become to such the idol which thrusts aside the Lord. 

Now, I am not about to argue against this. It is 
simply incredible. No man can believe it now, no man 
dares preach it now, who ever ventures outside the sad, 
dark, and narrow world of a hard, selfish, and paralysing 
theology. Is there one of you who can take in and rest 
upon the thought that the God who, in the strength of 
His love, endured an infinite anguish, that He might 
gather His sinning, suffering, struggling children to His 
heart, is filled with the whole tenderness of that love 
towards them during the little space of their mortal 
existence, but that He then lights up the fires, scorches 
them with the keenest pain in every fibre of their being, 
through endless ages; blind to the pleading glances of 
their anguish, deaf to the piercing cries of their pain, 
cold to the burning reproach with which they bemoan 



40 THE DOCTRINE OF EVERLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 



the curse of the existence with which He has endowed 
them, indifferent to the broken-hearted misery which 
might move the brutes, nay, the very stones, to pity, 
and must stir a man to help and save ? Who so can 
believe it let him believe it; the end of such belief is 
the abyss of atheistic despair. 

But how could man ever believe it ? How could such 
a creed ever plant itself in the Christian world and grow ? 
In answering this question, which naturally arises, and 
which is full of interest, I must study severe compression. 
I am not attempting to write a treatise ; I rather seek to 
indicate lines of thought which my readers may follow for 
themselves, and which seem to me to lead in the direction 
of the truth. I offer the following suggestions as helping 
to explain to us how it became possible that such a belief 
should be entertained and cherished in Christian hearts. 
Eemember, no man sees all round his creed. Always 
there is a dark side, with some there are many dark sides, 
which are never fairly explored. It is only when the 
background of the thought of the age throws these 
shadowy forms into strong relief, that men arouse them- 
selves to look into them, and measure their harmonies 
with the truth of God. Just such an awakening is happen- 
ing to the believers in these doctrines now. 

1 . The first key to the belief of the Church in this 
tremendous dogma is to be found in the inward torment 
of sin. The cry of the agonised spirit under conviction 
of sin, 6 0 miserable man that I am ! who shall deliver 



THE DOCTKINE OF EVEKLASTINGr PUNISHMENT. 



41 



me from the body of this death ? ' made the idea of the 
outward torment in some sort credible ; and as for the 
eternity, a man might say : 'If I am to live for ever, and 
this accursed flesh,' as Persius has it, c is to cling to me ; 
if I, with the very fibres of whose nature sin seems to be 
en woven, am to live on, why sin lives with me, in me, 
and h ow can I escape from misery ? ' We must remember 
that the pressure of this sense of sin is so terrible, that 
a great multitude of our fellow men find their only rest 
in a creed which demands the annihilation or the absorp- 
tion of the individual consciousness as the condition of 
blessedness; and then we shall not wonder that men, 
looking only at themselves, not having faith, and taught 
that they were to live for ever — crushed, too, by the sense 
of their own sins, their own crimes — have been ready to 
crouch under the terror of torment, which their priests 
wielded as an instrument of influence more potent than 
the Gospel of love. 

2. Those who have cared to consider this doctrine in 
its larger aspects, to think about it, and to write about it, 
and who have explained, defended, and enforced it, as a 
rule have had the happy conviction that they were elect 
to the blessedness of heaven. Much depends on the side 
from which such a doctrine is contemplated, as to the 
composure with which it is regarded. We hear only the 
voice of those who contemplate it from the safe side. 
The cry of a sinful, suffering life, endowed with free- 
dom, with a fatal taint in the blood, crushed by the 



42 THE DOCTBINE OF EVEKLASTDsG- PUXTSTnfEXT 



sense of the power of temptation, and obnoxious to the 
pains of eternal death, rarely becomes articulate in the 
literature of the Church. V>~e hear something of the 
soids whom the terror has driven to the priest, nothing of 
the multitudes whom it has embrutalised and destroyed. 
So in revival movements we hear everything about those 
who are aroused and apparently quickened ; nothing* 
about the throngs who are distressed and saddened by the 
coarse excitements and the incredible theology, or who 
pass from scoffing into lasting indifference and despair. 
The writers are always on the affirmative side. There is 
one remarkable exception, however. The inner history of 
Lord Bvron's life hinges on the fact that he believed him- 
self to be in the Calvinistic sense reprobate, and in fierce 
frenzv he gave all diligence to make what he believed to 
be his calling and election to perdition sure. 

3. It must be remembered that the doctrine was deve- 
loped in times of fierce persecution, when Christians 
suffered horrible tortures at the hands of their heathen 
foes. They were times of torture when the doctrine 
rooted itself in the Christian world. The flesh shudders 
when we read the narrative of the exquisite torments 
which were inflicted, not on strong men only, but on deli- 
cate women and tender children, whose only crime, in 
the judgment of their tormenters. was faith in the Saviour. 
The Christians, as a rule, were nobly true to the spirit of 
their creed and the traditions of their Church, and prayed 
for their tyrants even in death. But the spectacle of such 



THE DOCTBINE OF EVERLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 43 

agonies, and the constant peril of being called to endure 
them, made it easier to believe in a tremendous act of 
retribution, which should cover the persecutors with ever- 
lasting contempt and shame. 

4. The doctrine grew to a head in times of high-handed 
wrong, of cruelty, tyranny, covetousness, and lust. Earthly 
law was trampled upon, the weak were spoiled, the poor 
were ground down to the dust, and no power on earth but 
the Church rose up to withstand the tyranny that laid waste 
the world. Wonder not that the Church was tempted to 
wield her weapons of terror with fierce determination, 
and to make the mockers of earthly sanctities tremble 
before the vision of the tortures of an everlasting hell. 
Then, too, men were used to cruelty ; pain, even terrible 
pain, seemed to them the natural heritage of the human. 
Whole classes seemed born to suffer ; there was the less to- 
make men shudder in the thought of great masses tor- 
mented by the hand of Almighty vengeance through 
a long eternity. You must read more deeply than popular 
histories will carry you, the records of the life of Italian 
cities in that thirteenth century, if you would understand 
the inner motive of that tremendous drama of retribution 
which Dante's 6 Inferno ' unveils. 

5. Those were the days of privileged classes, and 
orders, and races, in which an elect few seemed bom to- 
honour, power, and pleasure, while the great mass lived 
socially in a kind of outer darkness, as hopeless of fighting 
their way into the inner sacred circle^ as of climbing to- 



44 THE DOCTKINE OF EVERLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 

another world. The stricter application of the Christian 
doctrine of brotherhood, the equality of all men before 
God, and in all essentials before each other, has compelled 
a reconsideration of the principle of the equality of Grod's 
ways, which the Scriptures hold so dear. The order of the 
Universe, which was contemplated by President Edwards 
with satisfaction, can be contemplated now without dis- 
gust and horror by those only who bury their souls in the 
crassest ignorance of the world, of man, and of God. 
But, 

6. The most important consideration as a key to the 
history of this belief is this. The Church, while she 
wielded the terrors, held the keys. She frightened men 
deliberately by pictures of unutterable torments ; but it 
was to frighten men to the Church, the Church claiming 
the power to shield her obedient children from the doom 
which she unveiled. Church penances, absolutions, unc- 
tions, and the whole apparatus of purgatory, softened the 
terror of the dogma immensely ; men were more readily per- 
suaded to acquiesce in the doctrine, in that its cutting edge 
was practically turned by the shield of the Church. I do 
not dwell on the tricks, the frauds, the myriad abomina- 
tions of mediaeval penances and indulgences. We will 
hear a purer witness. Augustine writes : ' Nor is it to be 
denied that the souls of the dead are relieved by the piety 
of their living friends, when for them the sacrifice of the 
Mediator is offered, or alms are done in the church. But 
these things are profitable to those who, when alive, 



THE DOCTBINE OF EVEBLASTING PUNISHMENT. 45 



deserved that these things should hereafter profit them. 
For there is a certain manner of life, neither so good as 
not to stand in need of these things after death, nor yet so 
bad as that these things profit not after death.' (You will 
note that this describes the condition of the great multi- 
tude of men who would not have the faintest chance of 
being received into our churches, but who according to 
this patristic doctrine were not beyond the reach of this 
vicarious aid after death). 6 . . . . When, therefore, sacri- 
fices, whether of the altar or of any alms whatever, are 
offered for all baptised persons deceased, for the very good 
they are givings of thanks, for the not very bad they 
are propitiations, for the very bad, although they be no 
helpers of the dead, yet they are consolations, such as 
they are, of the living.' — ' Enchiridion,' c. 110. 

And again, ' Forgiveness of sins. Ye have (this article 
of) the creed in you perfectly when ye receive baptism. 
Let none say, I have done this or that sin ; perchance that 
is not forgiven me. What hast thou done ? How great 
a sin hast thou done? Name any heinous sin thou hast 
committed — heavy, terrible, which thou shudclerest to think 
of — have done what thou wilt ; hast thou killed Christ ? 
. . . . For the sake of all sins baptism was provided, 
for the sake of light sins, without which we cannot be, 

was prayer provided Once for all we have washing 

by baptism, every day we have washing in prayer. Only 
do not commit those things for the sake of which ye needs 
must be separated from Christ's body, which be far from 



46 THE DOCTRINE OP EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT. 



you. For those whom ye have seen doing penance, have 
committed heinous things, either adulteries or some enor- 
mous crimes ; for these they do penance. Because if these 
had been light sins, to blot out these daily prayer would 
suffice/ — ; Serm. ad Catech. 5 15. 

You see how the doctrine was softened to the ap- 
prehension of men. through the whole Middle Age, by the 
sacraments and discipline of the Church. I need not 
remind students of mediaeval history that offences against 
the Church were regarded with peculiar sternness, and 
were held to be most obnoxious to these everlasting pains. 
But when the Eeformation came, a tremendous revolution 
was accomplished. The Church vanished as a shield be- 
tween the sinner and the wrath to come. The Reformed 
Churches renounced the power of the keys, but retained 
and even intensified the terror. To Calvinism baptism is 
nothing as a shield, the Lord's Supper is nothing as a 
shield : all depends on the lively faith of the individual 
man. and a life in accord with the patterns in the Divine 
word. Of that life it is said. ; the righteous scarcely are 
-saved." while some are ' saved so as by fire ; 5 it is a life so 
lofty and pure that the great multitude are tempted to 
say that it is quite too high for them, which Calvinism 
presents to the contemplation of the sinner ; while you 
have heard the alternative in the unutterable horrors 
which Edwards straggles in vain to describe. 

Now there can be no doubt that the manner in which 
the mediaeval Church handled this power of the keys, and 



THE DOCTKINE OF EVERLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 47 



opened or shut the awful gates at pleasure or for pay, 
gradually exhausted the doctrine of all solemnity and 
ultimately of all reality. Men ceased to attach much 
meaning to it. The men of Dunstable, who when they 
were excommunicated for not paying a tax which seemed 
to them unfair, calmly informed their Prior that they would 
rather go to hell than pay an unjust impost, but put into 
form the thought to which the secular mind had been 
driven by the shameless policy of the Church. Men said 
to themselves: ' These unseen things which these priests 
parade seem very shadowy and unreal ; they seem to be 
able to do what they like with them ; we secular people 
may safely leave them to the clergy who seem to under- 
stand them, and go with an honest heart and a good con- 
science about our secular work.' 

And this is the inevitable result of proclaiming in- 
credible doctrine as Christian truth. Men leave it to 
the priests, or to those whom they call the saints, as a 
matter with which they have no practical concern. And 
this opens a dread chasm between the religious life and 
the sphere of secular duty: between the Church and 
the world which it was sent to save. This is precisely 
what is happening now. Calvinism braced immensely 
the moral tone of society. It would be hard to exaggerate 
its work in restoring the awe of Divine and spiritual 
things in human hearts. In a world of fierce contention, 
of foul vices, of high-handed wrong, and of bitter perse- 
cution of the faithful disciples of the Lord, the doctrine 



43 THE DOCTRINE OP EVERLASTING PUNISH KENT . 



gained new power : chiefly over those who were the objects 
of the persecution, who lived in the little circle of a nar- 
row but intense religious experience, and to whom the 
world outside seemed to be already visibly branded with 
the mark of the devil. But now that Christian people 
live in happier, and I venture to think holier, relations 
with the world around them, I note the effort to tone 
down in every possible way the horror of eternal torment. 
The moment that a man dies, a thousand kindly traits 
are eagerly remembered and dwelt upon, as justifying a 
hope about him ; and touches of goodness which would 
not for an instant have secured him admission to our 
Churches on earth, are fondly recalled, as nourishing a 
hope of his admission into the Church in Heaven. I 
remember smiling to myself at the sermons which were 
preached in Calvinistic as well as Broad Church pulpits, 
after the death of the Duke of Wellington and Lord Pal- 
merston. Multitudes discovered something almost saintly 
about them when dead, who, I imagine, when they were 
living would have dealt stern judgment on them, and 
would have closed firmly against them the doors of their 
narrow fold. And thus it is ever. Propound incredible 
things, and men will escape in some way from the intoler- 
able pressure : meanwhile the moral tone of the Church 
gets steadily degTaded : it comes at last to cling, like a 
Church of old of which Isaiah writes, to idols of its own 
imagination, while it becomes stone-blind to the realities 
of truth. 



THE DOCTRINE OF EVERLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 49 

But there are multitudes who will say in answer to 
this argument, 6 We do not believe in this eternally 
vengeful and tormenting God.' I think that I may say, 
that the Church of our day, in the person of all its most 
intelligent members and teachers, has renounced this idea 
of eternal torture as too horrible. There is an almost 
universal consent to abandon this tradition of Calvinism, 
among our wisest and most influential ministers ; and it 
is said now, that what is meant by eternal punishment, is 
the fruit of sin in the sinner, distracting him and tor- 
menting him ; eternal exclusion from the home of GTod, the 
sphere of light, life, and joy ; and eternal condemnation to 
that dark region where the sinner finds ' his own place ' 
for ever. Here Ave get clearly on the track of a great 
truth. I shall have something to say on this version of 
the doctrine in my last lecture ; meanwhile I beg you to 
consider how far, if this be regarded as a Divine decree 5 
it implies the ordinance of eternal sin. If the sinner is 
to be left to his sin to punish him, and Grod ordains that, 
as regards not the sin, but the sinner, that punishment 
shall be eternal, then He must decree that the sin shall 
be eternal. If the sentence be, as Edwards held, a 
vengeful sentence, and Grod ordains that for the sin of 
this mortal life the man who dies impenitent shall be 
tormented everlastingly, then the moral condition of the 
sufferer comes as little into the account as the moral state 
of a criminal on the treadwheel or under the lash. But 
if the sin itself is to be its own punishment, and it is 

E 



50 THE DOCTKINE OF EVEKLASTING- PUNISHMENT. 



ordained that the punishment shall be eternal, then the 
ordinance must mean that no moan of pain shall ever 
melt into a sob of penitence ; that no pleading, wrestling 
cry, 'Lord, save, or I perishj shall ever burst from a 
breaking heart while eternity endures. 

One other word and I close. It seems to me that it 
is very possible to attach altogether too much importance 
to eternal rewards and punishments as motives to action 
and influences on life. The people whom God called of 
old into holy fellowship with Himself, whom He called by 
His name and held forth as His witnesses to all the earth, 
were taught very little about them ; and yet they wrote 
the Psalms, which still bear to Heaven the prayers and the 
praises of Christendom, and the oracles which unfold to 
us still the statutes and ordinances of national life. The 
Jews knew little about eternal rewards and punishments, 
but much about the living Grod. 

Life and immortality were brought to light by the 
Gospel. But light is not to see, but to see by. Gaze on 
the light continually, and a radiant but blinding mist 
will hide from you the humble path of duty at your feet. 
The soul that is always looking at what it calls eternal 
things, disqualifies and disables itself in the end for living 
the life by which the eternal prize is to be won. Let the 
light of the eternal fall on the temporal with its solemn, 
consecrating lustre, through your knowledge of and fel- 
lowship with Him who is the Life and the Light of men. 
Live much in His holy and blessed presence. Let the 



THE DOCTRINE OF EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT. 51 

mind which was in Christ Jesus be abundantly manifest 
in you ; drink deeply of that spring of vital inspiration 
which His love has opened for your spirit ; and then the 
humblest path of duty which you daily tread shall stretch 
up and on, widening and brightening as you travel, till 
you pass at last triumphant through the gates of the 
celestial city, and stand, the crowned victor of life's battle, 
radiant before the eternal throne. 




E 2 



52 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



III. 

THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION IX TEE 
LIGHT OF MAX'S NATURE, EXPERIENCE, AND 
HISTOET. 

He is not a God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto Him. 
LuTce xx. 38. 

I ester now on the consideration of the question, for the 
sake of which I have undertaken this course of lectures — 
the ultimate annihilation of the wicked. The doctrine 
is mixed up with, if it does not rest upon, the denial of 
what, speaking quite unscholastically, I might call man's 
natural immortality. Whatever man's natural endow- 
ment might have been in his first estate of innocence, 
it is contended that by the fall he became mortal in soul 
as well as in body like the brutes. It is further con- 
tended, that if any part of his being survives the shock 
of death, it must be by a distinct act of the Divine will 
4 deviating secretly from the ordinary course of nature,' 
as an able advocate of the doctrine expresses it, so as ' to 
render it possible to recover the identical man from the 
dead, through the miracle of a resurrection.' 1 It is seen 

1 Eev. E. White, Life in Christ, p. 69. 



THE DOCTBINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



53 



that the passages which establish the resurrection of all, 
the righteous and the wicked, are too many and too clear 
to be put aside. So it is held that, though man in death 
dies, body and soul, like the brutes, and as far as the law 
of his nature is concerned there is an end of him, Grocl, 
by a direct intervention, keeps part of him alive till the 
resurrection. Then the body and the soul of the sinner 
are to be reunited, that they may be tormented in a lake 
of fire so long and so sharply as may seem good to the 
Divine justice, but in any case so that it had been better 
for the man if he had never been born ; 1 then, after that, 
when justice has been satisfied by his sufferings, he is to 
be abolished out of the universe for ever. Believers, it is 
held, receive in regeneration the eternal life, a principle 
which is essentially immortal, and live on in glorious 
blessedness ; while the great mass of their fellows, 
naturally mortal as the brutes, having been raised up 
to be tormented for a season, when their torment is over, 
fulfil the destiny of their nature, and perish. 

The doctrine is variously clothed and presented ; but 
these seem to me to be the bones of it, this is the skeleton 
which is within. 

I have ventured to call this a miserable doctrine; 
though, strange as it may seem, 1 see much reason to 
honour the courage and the intelligence of the men who 
first broached it. It was one step, at any rate, out of the 
incredible. But I find it hard to express the intense 

1 Rev. E. mite, Life in Christ, p. 285. 



54 THE DOCTKINE OP ANNIHILATION. 



repugnance with which, this doctrine inspires me, whether 
I look at it from the Divine or the human side. I hope, 
however, to justify the repugnance, and the strong term 
by which I have characterised it, before I have finished 
my next discourse. 

I have taken for my text a sentence of Christ, which 
was spoken in argument on this very subject, and which 
seems to me utterly fatal to the theory of annihilation. 
The Sadducees thought that man, soul and body, perished 
in death. A curious attempt is made by writers of this 
school of annihilationists, to break the force of this sen- 
tence against their theories, by contending that it is the 
resurrection of the body which is here in question — that 
as the man Abraham could not be said to live until his 
body was raised, the fact that he lived in the sight of Grod 
involved the certainty of his bodily resurrection. But 
the Scriptures, blessed be Grod, never mistake the body 
for the man ; Paul, 6 absent from the body, 5 believed that 
he would be Paul still. And the resurrection of the body 
is a phrase which never occurs in the Bible ; always it is 
the resurrection of or from the dead, the standing up 
again of the man in life, clothed as it pleaseth Grod, after 
he has passed through the shock of death. The question 
here, as the Lord distinctly states, is of the resurrection 
of the dead : 6 Now that the dead are raised even Moses 
showed at the bush.' How ? By bearing the message 
' the Grod of Abraham, the Grod of Isaac, the G od of Jacob- 
hath sent me unto you.' Grod is not the Grod of the dead 



THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



55 



but of the living. Therefore the beings of whom Grod 
calls Himself the Grod, live. But the Grod who called 
Himself the Grod of Abraham called Himself also the 
Grod of their fathers, that is of their race, who, therefore, 
by precisely the same reasoning, were living. And the 
same Grod, in the same chapter, calls Himself the Grod of 
the Hebrews ; and again and again calls the nation, as a 
nation, by His name — His 4 own people,' His 6 Kingly 
priests, 5 in whom therefore it would seem that He dis- 
cerned the same undying life. This conclusion seems 
indisputable, if we are to attach any validity to the 
reasoning of our Lord. But lest any doubt should rest on 
the breadth of the humanity which the argument was 
meant to cover, St. Luke, the (xentile Evangelist, who 
always brings out the world-wide aspects of Christ's 
teaching, both in the discourses and the parables, adds 
an enlargement of the thought which is contained in 
St. Matthew, and claims the demonstration of immor- 
tality for humanity at large — c for all live to Him ; ' man 
as man has a unique relation to the Father of spirits, in 
that he has an immortal nature and lives before the face 
of Grod for ever. 

In entire harmony with this demonstration of our 
Lord is the whole witness of Scripture. The immortality 
of the human soul is not formally taught as a dogma ; it 
is everywhere, after the manner of Scripture, assumed as 
unquestionable. David was not speaking of an entity of 
which his people were wholly ignorant, and which needed 



56 THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 

elaborate explanation, when he traced the destiny of the 
immortal part of him, in words which were to be the pil- 
grim songs of the nation through all their generations, 
and which must have been pure enigma to them if 
they believed that their whole being perished in death 
like the brutes. One can hardly deal seriously with the 
argument that the 23rd Psalm was written to be sung by 
men and women whose minds were an utter blank on the 
subject of immortality. There was no difficulty arising 
out of the utter ignorance of the Jewish mind about the 
matter, in the reception of the tale of the recall of the 
dead prophet to give counsel to the living king. The 
words of the Bible must be invented to ensnare, if the 
Jews were intended to believe, that what was written in 
their earliest records about Enoch meant only that he 
perished like a beast. Elijah's rapture seemed quite in the 
true order of things to his prophetic successor ; and men 
trained in the Jewish Scriptures found it in nowise a thing 
to be doubted, when on the Mount of Transfiguration the 
man Elijah reappeared. Is it for a moment credible, that 
Christ in the most awful moment of His anguish com- 
mended His spirit to the Father, in words drawn from the 
Psalter of a people to whom death meant blank annihila- 
tion ? Would Abigail have dared to use what would have 
been the blasphemous phrase, 6 As the Lord liveth and as 
thy soul liveth ' (1 Sam. xxv. 26) if she had believed that 
the soul of David was but the breath of his nostrils like the 
soul of the beasts — that soul which, as Abigail knew well, 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 57 

was ' bound up in the bundle of life with the Lord his 
God ' ? It was out of the bosom of the Jewish nation, 
too, that the great party was developed which held the 
doctrine of the Resurrection. They prided themselves 
on being true to its traditions and instructed in its Scrip- 
tures. And it was as a Pharisee, an heir of Jewish tradi- 
tions and a student of Jewish theology, appealing expressly 
to the fathers (Acts xxiii., 6 xxvi. 5-8), that Paul the 
Apostle claimed the doctrine of the resurrection of the 
dead as an essential feature of Divine truth. 

It is contended by writers of this school that nothing 
could be more unlikely than that Adam, created in a world 
where everything was mortal, where through untold ages 
hosts of creatures had been swept in successive generations 
to destruction, and were dying still whenever he breathed, 
wherever he trod, should prove the one exception to the uni- 
versal law, and be endowed with a, spirit destined to survive 

the war of elements 
The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds. 

The simple Hebrew term covers, we are told, the soul of 
animals and the soul of man ; manifestly then they must 
be the same order and have the same natural destiny. I 
have not read, however, in the Hebrew Scripture, that Grod 
created the beasts in His own image, in His likeness ; nor 
do I find Him called the Grod of the spirits of all the 
brutes : nor does He speak to, deal with, plead with, the 
brutes through all the ages of prechristian history as His 
children, in whom the Father of spirits seems to recognise 



58 THE D0CTK1NE OE ANNIHILATION. 



the presence of a nature which has close kindred with 
Himself. 

But whatever may have been man's original endow- 
ment, we are told that he must have lost it by transgres- 
sion; that the sentence, 6 in the day that thou eatest 
thereof thou shalt surely die,' either announced, or con- 
demned him to, mortality, and from that time, at any 
rate, he became as the beasts. On the contrary, I read 
in the Bible, as immediately consequent on transgression, 
this remarkable sentence, ' Behold the man is become as 
one of us, knowing good and evil.' I see a clear recogni- 
tion here that man had taken a distinct step in the 
development of his being ; he had enlarged the capacity 
and experience of his nature, while he had lost the regu- 
lating principle. He had brought himself by sin within 
reach of the direst catastrophes on the one hand, while 
he had brought himself within reach, through grace, of 
God's great purpose and hope for him, Eedemption, on 
the other. Certainly, if these words mean anything, man 
could not have lost by transgression that through which 
alone he could be redeemed. I find, too, that at once, 
instead of treating him as a being whose nature had sunk 
to the bestial level, God met him with a promise of Incar- 
nation. A great hope was built on the promise of 4 the 
seed of the woman;' the whole culture of humanity 
through the Old Testament era was but the bringing out 
with ever increasing clearness of all that Incarnation 
meant and foretold. Grocl mixed Himself up as a man 



THE DOCTEINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



59 



with the life of the human. Already in the early dawn 
of history the sacred Form may be seen taking its place 
by the world's hearth fire. The relations He established 
are human relations ; friend, husband, father, are all 
familiar terms in His revelation of Himself to mankind. 
And all was promised in the very hour of transgression. ; 
all this higher and holier relationship then began to be. 
Now there are some things that to me are blankly incre- 
dible ; I cannot help it. I may be weak in judgment 
and in mental power, but thus it is ; it is blankly incredible 
to me that Grod could become incarnate in a being whom 
he regarded as a magnificently-endowed and highly-deve- 
loped brute. No ! Nor did David dream, when he spoke 
of man as 'little lower than the angels,' that the next 
rank in the Creation, a little lower only than those pure 
immortals, was a creature whose breath was in his nostrils, 
whose whole being was crushed before the moth, and who 
was compounded only of a handful of finely-manipulated 
dust. 

Think, too, of the unutterable tenderness with which 
God pleads with and yearns over men ; yea, even the 
rebellious also, that the Lord Grod might dwell among 
them. ' Is Ephraim my dear son, is he a pleasant child ? 
for since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember 
him still. Therefore my bowels are troubled for him, 
I will surely have mercy on him, saith the Lord.' And 
this is the keynote of all (rod's pleadings with the sinful, 
sensual race He yearned to redeem. Do you ask me to 



60 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



believe that that unutterable wealth of Divine tenderness 
was poured forth around a creature whom a brickbat 
•could extinguish in a moment ? Ask me to believe at the 
same time that the Bible is a book of maudlin effusion ; 
and that the Grod who inspired it, and who wrote His 
name on Calvary, lives in a world of sentimental dreams. 

And when we pass on to the Incarnation, what does 
' the Son of Man ' mean ? The son of an animal ? The 
brother of an animal ? ' Seeing that the children were 
partakers of flesh and blood. He Himself also took part of 
the same.' Eemember, it is here a question of the race. 
It is David's estimate of man as man in the 8th Psalm, 
which the writer of the Hebrews tells us Christ came to 
explain and to justify. It is because He is one with us 
all, the children of the great human home, bone of our 
human bone, and flesh of our human flesh, that He calls us 
brethren. Eead the 22nd Psalm, from which Heb. ii. 12 
is quoted. You will see that it is to the great human 
congregation that the Saviour declares, as to His brethren, 
the name of the Lord. If man has but the animal life 
which perishes, the whole human congregation, from, 
(rod's lofty height, are but as a swarm of busy gnats 
which a flash sweeps into annihilation. Son of man ! 
Brother of man ! ' He came to His own, and His own 
received Him not.' 4 He was wounded in the house of 
his friends.' If they have an immortal life of whom Grod 
called Himself the Grod, are the Saviour's 6 brethren,' the 
Saviour's 6 own,' only a little higher than the beasts ? Ah ! 



THE LOCTEINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



61 



how these deniers of man's immortality murder the 
brotherhood of the race of which the Eedeemer came as 
the Son. In place of a great human family of sorrow, 
struggle, and aspiration, amidst which as a brother of the 
poorest and the saddest the Saviour moved, they give us 
a few lofty Godlike forms — or say that they give us, men 
complain that they cannot see them — endowed with a 
nature which cannot perish, and like unto the angels, 
moving about as the Brahmins of Creation, amidst in- 
numerable creatures who look like them, speak like them^ 
love like them, but are perishing pariahs, born from the 
dust. 

To me this is simply a horrible picture of the order 
of the great world of men. 

We are instructed by these scholars that Plato, not 
the Bible, is the teacher of man's immortality. The 
references to Plato as the true father of the doctrine are 
abundant in the literature of the annihilationist schools. 
But the world was full of the idea when Moses led his 
people forth out of Egypt, and, as Von Bunsen says, 
history was born. Students of early Egyptian history 
know well, that not only was the immortality of man's 
spirit a firm article of belief, but a most elaborate system 
of future retributions was propounded and kept before the 
eyes of the people, to be used for his own selfish pur- 
poses by that tyrannous terrorist, the priest. There are 
able scholars who believe that it was the excess of this 
doctrine of retribution, the use which was made of it, and 



62 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



the evil which grew out of it to the miserable priest- 
ridden people, which explains its withdrawal from the 
forefront of the Mosaic legislation, and the setting forth 
of a more vital, more central truth, man's living relation 
to the living Grod, in its stead. 1 And there is perhaps 
something more to be said about it, at which I can only 
at present glance. In a low stage of moral development 
the doctrine, in the hands of a learned and powerful 
priesthood, may easily become immoral, a mere rule of 
terror ; while the simple, grand, noble truth which was 
preached to the Jewish people, Do right because Grod loves 
it, and His blessing goes with it, while His curse goes with 
wrong, lies at the basis of all high moral development 
here or in any w 7 orld. Thus the absence of this doctrine 
from the legislation of the Pentateuch, may help to ex- 
plain the singular freedom from priestly tyranny which 
the Jews enjoyed. But none the less was it present with 
them, a stimulating, quickening influence in the atmo- 
sphere of their life. 

But through the whole earth, in Egypt, in Assyria, in 
Greece, as we gather from the Homeric poems, in India, 
the idea was established and was a tremendous factor in 
the life of the world. Sin cast its terrible shadow over 
man's immortal existence, and so it came to pass that the 
pictures presented by priests and poets smelt of the grave 
and gloomed of the night. But still the thing was there. 

1 See the remarks on this subject in Ewald's History of Israel. 



THE DOCTEINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



63 



Man was haunted everywhere by this vision of immor- 
tality. In India the torment of the thought of personal 
responsibility, will, choice, activity, was so terrible that 
the religion of a third of the human race won its way to 
power, not by denying immortality, but by promising a 
painless absorption of the individual spirit into the 
supreme as its bliss. Everywhere the belief clings to 
man and is, in all ages, in all countries, the instrument 
by which the priest rules and constantly blights his life. 

Here, then, you have a belief well-nigh universal, 
coming forth into full prominence in all the wisest and 
most cultivated peoples ; but in the absence of Eevelation 
for the most part dim, dark, and sad, through the sinful 
sadness of life. The time came when in the field of Eeve- 
lation ' life and immortality ' were 6 brought to light ; ' not 
born, not created, but brought out of the world of guesses, 
hopes, and shadows, into light. The reality was laid bare 
by the Gospel, which explained perfectly this universal 
human belief and experience. Man's belief in immor- 
tality was amply sustained and justified when immortality 
was brought to light by Christ. We are literally asked 
by these annihilationists to believe that this was quite a 
new doctrine, having reference to quite a new order of 
things under Christianity, and that the all but universal 
belief in it which preceded its full revelation had abso- 
lutely no truth in it, and belonged to the world of delusion 
and dreams. Is it come to this ? Are we shut up to the 
belief that the heathen peoples of the world had visions of 



64 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



the essential dignity of man's nature and the largeness of 
his destiny, "which made his sin seem shameful and his 
previsions of its retribution terrible ; while the Scriptures 
of truth, which proclaim that the Incarnate Grod died 
that this human race might be saved, declare throughout 
the whole elder dispensation that the race is, after all, of 
the same order as •the brutes. I would that these des- 
pisers of man's immortality would wake up to see what 
a tremendous weapon they are putting into the hands of 
the Atheist, in slighting these deepest and most universal 
convictions of the great human world. I know that I 
shall be told, ' Oh ! we believe that man is of higher 
quality than the brutes; he is an # intelligent, moral, and 
responsible being, and we by no means confound him with 
the creature.' But the answer to this is clear and stern : 
if you prove that man's nature and life are spoken of as 
co-ordinate with those of the brutes at one end of the 
scale, and cut off immortality at the other, you leave no 
room for the play of this higher life of man, no ground 
for it to stand on. Men will say inevitably, 6 If this is what 
your Bible teaches, the Materialist is right. Eeason is 
but accumulated experience, and will is but the discharge 
of a battery, the cells of which are all arranged in due 
order within.' The notion of a soul immortal enough to 
live through death, but not immortal enough to live on 
for ever, is too childish to be entertained beyond the little 
school of literalists who delight in it. The world outside 
will be content to believe that that which proves its powers 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 65 

to live through death claims its immortality. Long, 
long may it be before this dismal school tempts either 
Church or world to abandon for this doctrine of degrada- 
tion, the teachings of Scripture, the witness of the Incar- 
nation, and the most sacred and elevating beliefs of 
mankind ! 

But it is when we lift our eyes and look round at this 
great human world, this profound and wonderful human 
life, into which ' the powers of the world to come 5 enter 
at every point as essential factors, and which seems 
framed on a scale so large that it demands eternity to 
develope and to complete it, that this doctrine most de- 
grades mankind. Human life, from the very first, was 
ordained, was laid out, upon a plan which contemplated 
immortality. It is a dread, a tremendous endowment, 
this power of will, with the inward conflict and anguish 
into which man is of necessity plunged ; for they begin 
with the first dawnings of consciousness, and the materials 
for the strife are laid up in every nature that is born into 
the world. We come into the world by no act of our own. 
"We are endowed with a nature, a flesh, whose openness to 
temptation we had no hand in making, and we find our- 
selves surrounded by a world which tempts it with resist- 
less pressure, whose structure was ordained without the 
slightest reference to our will. Sin we must, in one 
sense; the sin of man is universal ; yet sin we must not ; 
a voice within and a voice above warn us that it is 
pollution, ending inevitably in remorse and death. Here 



66 



THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



is the anguish of life ; a nature prone fatally to trans- 
gression, a spirit which denounces that transgression as 
madness, and prophesies as its doom misery and despair. 
And the struggle, the agony, is universal ; the world of 
earth is one great scene of spiritual strain and anguish, 
whose moans would drown the music ,of the morning stars, 
if there were not eternity to unfold the mystery, and to re- 
veal that at the heart of it all there is ineffable and in- 
finite love. 

The struggle for life is solemn in the lower Creation ; 
it would be unutterably sad if there were the human 
consciousness there ; the reason which ' looks before and 
after ;' the abiding memory of joy or pain ; the power of 
foreseeing and of foretasting misery and bliss. If all the 
outward visible storm and strife, by which the creatures 
who are palpably glad in their life, 6 have their day, and 
cease to be,' were but the outward sign of an inward 
spiritual anguish, we should shrink from the vision of life 
with horror. The procession of life would then be a 
march which a demon only could lead, and at the head of 
which a demon only could rejoice. In man, through this 
inward spiritual strain and travail, you come manifestly 
into the sphere of the Divine and the eternal. His nature 
imagines of necessity eternity as its sphere. It strains 
to it ; it is always lifting the veil of death, in hope, in 
dread, and peering into what is behind, for it knows that 
its destiny is there. And unless all is ' Maya ' illusion, 
as Hindoo philosophers tell us, it must, with all its 



THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



67 



tremendous burdens, all its confused problems, all its vast 
•capacities, have eternity before it to work out its issues 
and to reap its fruits. 

And it is human life of which I am speaking, the life 
of the great human world ; not the life of the company of 
4 professors,' who think that they have a monopoly of 
spiritual experience and spiritual destiny. I read lofty 
words about the wonderful excellence and eminence of 
the professing Christian; and the tone prevalent 1 in this 
school of writers is to me a sad one, about the wickedness, 
the wretchedness, the worthlessness of the world outside. 
The longer I live the more clearly do I seem to see the 
essential falseness of these sharp divisions. I see constantly 
in the poor world outside traces of noble, beautiful, 
even heavenly qualities and actions, side by side with 
things that are manifestly sensual, selfish, dishonest, or 
base; just as I see signs of very narrow, envious, and 
selfish passions staining the lives of good, self-devoted, 
and pure-minded Christian men. And I think that I 
understand better than I did, why it was this world out- 
side that Jesus loved to dwell with ; why He found His 
tenderness drawn forth to the great mass of humanity 
which ' the wise ' and 6 the righteous ' thought meet only 
for perdition ; and why He was sure that He should find 
chiefly among this class His disciples and friends. His 
eye was ever keen to catch the traces of the stirrings of 

1 I say prevalent ; I am far from saying that it is universal. 
f 2 



68 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



desire or impulse which, looked towards His kingdom, in 
persons or classes who seemed to be most remote from 
it ; and it is strange how our ears are dulled to those tre- 
mendous words which ought to be ever ringing through 
Christendom, which He spake to the self-affirmed righteous 
of His time : c I say unto you, that the publicans and the 
harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you.' 

The instances of noble self-denial and self-devotion 
among the poorest of the poor, who make no profession 
of belief, who hardly know what you mean by it, put me 
and many of us, with our blessed opportunities of Christian 
culture, to shame. "Poor women who have toiled the long* 
day through at such toil as we should not touch with our 
dainty fingers, weary, faint, half-fed, will watch by a sick 
neighbour through the long night, fearless of infection ; 
and then wake, after a snatch of slumber, to work again. 
A poor household with one loaf will halve it with the 
poorer next door who have none. 4 The wicked 5 we label 
them, and pass on our way. Blessed be Christ ! He has 
told us that He cares for the wicked. He marks and 
records what has no earthly remembrancer ; He made 
His home, He has His home, among the outcast poor. 
And think what toils are manfully borne, what sacrifices 
are cheerfully made, what anguish is bravely endured, for 
love. We little estimate the healing, purifying influence 
of the love that abounds on earth, through all its selfish- 
ness and sin, on the lives of men. It is the salt which saves 
them from corruption, it is the consecration which lends 



THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



G9 



•some sacredness, at any rate, to the commonest life. 
Wonderful is the wearing toil that love sustains, the 
life-long struggle that love endures, the ceaseless sacrifice 
that love offers, in the poorest homes, and, in a way that 
is a great mystery, often in the darkest and most ignorant 
hearts. Ah ! if charity covereth a multitude of sins, 
there is many a sin covered by love, in homes that we 
should brand as hotbeds of corruption, and in hearts 
that we should drive out scornfully to the pit. 

But whither does this tend? Is man saved by an 
act of self-denial, or by a life whose hue of transgression 
is chequered by gleams of unselfish and beautiful love ? 
]STo ; I believe as firmly as any man can believe, that there 
is no name given under heaven whereby we must be saved 
but the name of Christ. I believe that the life eternal, 
that which lifts existence into life, is born only of the 
Spirit, the inworking and indwelling of the Spirit in 
human hearts. I believe that in the order of the ascend- 
ing stages of creation, which the philosophers — and we 
have no call to contradict them, let them settle it — tell us 
that they can trace upwards from the lowest atom of vital 
tissue to man, man, at the head of the physical order, the 
most perfect type of form, was quickened with a life which 
related him at once to a higher order of being, and made 
him in his nature a link between two worlds. I believe 
that he was thus constituted with a view to his redemp- 
tion ; and that in the purpose of God who endowed him 
with an immortal nature, existence is to be lifted and 



70 



THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



transformed into life eternal, life blessed and glorious like 
God's, by the knowledge of Him who died as the propi- 
tiation for our sin on Calvary, as borne in by the Spirit 
and planted as a vital germ of salvation in the core of 
the sinner's heart. But I believe further, and Christ is 
my clear warrant for the belief, that He has far, far wider 
and closer dealings with these prodigals and pariahs of 
the human Creation, outside this ' immortal caste,' than any 
of us dream ; dealings which the righteous ' elder son 5 
always views with distrust and stings with scorn. And 
I am sure through Christ that these dim workings of noble 
and beautiful powers in dark, sad, sinful hearts are too 
precious to be swept to annihilation ; they are not spiritual 
life, but they are workings of the human, not born without 
the Spirit, I believe firmly, with which the Spirit seeks 
to join Himself, that He may purify and elevate them by 
faith to vital principles of action, and save them by the 
knowledge of the truth ; and I say that if in your system 
of things they are of slight account, and may be swept 
out carelessly before they have had the fair chance even 
of fruiting, as meet only for destruction, you open to me 
the vision of an intolerable, an incredible spiritual waste. 

And I pray you to consider what life is to the great 
mass of our fellow men. I do not mean through their 
own personal transgressions, but through the hardness of 
the conditions under which, by no choice of their own, 
they are constrained to live. We should shudder if we 
could realise how many wasted brains, tormented nerves, 



THE DOCTRINE OE ANNIHILATION. 71 

and breaking hearts, through the pressure of the struggle 
for life, the world contains at this moment ; souls whose 
mute cry to the Grod who made them is. The strain is too 
hard, unbind me and let me go. Who shall measure the 
desolations of tyranny and war, of slavery and wrong ? 
Who shall weigh the miseries of which our splendid com- 
merce is the parent, to those who 6 sing the song of the 
shirt ' in its workshops, or utter the c cry of the human 5 
in the lairs in which its helots herd like the beasts? 
We hear much from well-fed, well-clad, well-housed 
gentlemen, of the comfort of the life of a skilled work- 
ing man. I think of it sometimes when I see our tram- 
way men, snatching their bit of dinner out of a basin in 
the cars in the intervals of their journeys ; working on 
from early morning till late at night day after day, month 
after month, in all weathers, with the prospect of working 
on thus incessantly till they drop in death. And their lot 
is a happy one compared with that of millions in our free 
and wealthy England, and of hundreds of millions 
throughout the world, whose life is one long death-grapple 
with famine, and who sigh daily for the grave ' where the 
wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.' 

Ah ! Christian friends, with home and food and fire, 
and literature and society and travel, and ' all things 
richly to enjoy,' think sometimes of the terrible contrasts 
of society. Think of the 6 Arab ' child trained to crime 
from his youth and nursed in misery; think of whole 
classes, in number millions to your thousands, shut out 



72 



THE DOCTKIXE OE ANNIHILATION 



from all that makes life beautiful and goodly to you ; and 
then think of them if you can, if you dare, swept out to 
annihilation, without a chance of learning the meaning of 
life's benediction, without a hope of ever being within 
reach of tasting how blessed a thing it may be to be. 
The terrible inequalities of society in a world of which 
God has not resigned the kingship, and of the whole out- 
come of whose life He accepts the responsibility by main- 
taining it in existence, would be dark, dark indeed, if 
there were no hope of their redress in the boundless range 
of the universe and of man's undying existence ; if we 
might not dare to believe that every soul that is judged 
of Grod shall have at some time some fair field for the 
exercise of its freedom, and some clear vision of what may 
be possible for life. 

' But they have heard ; this, at any rate, is a Grospel 
land ; if any perish here they perish in wilful unbelief.' 
Have they heard ? I tell you there are multitudes in this 
London of ours who have never heard the name of Christ 
but in jests or in blasphemies. Multitudes more to whom 
its music has been ' miserably marred by controversial 
screech-pipes or priestly mumblings, and to whom its 
light has become utterly dimmed as it flashed through 
6 the smoke of the torment ' of the pit. Are they never 
to hear of the love of Christ, as Christ would have 
preached it ? Are the souls whom He died to redeem, 
and whom as He entered the cloud of the Passion He 
gathered to His heart, never, never, through a long 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION, 



73 



eternity to hear the music of Christ's invitation? or have 
a chance of tasting the sweetness of His love ? The 
Church was once more pitiful. The bright gleam of hope 
which was suggested by * the preaching to the spirits in 
prison ' was caught and cherished. Wise teachers held 
that all, in some full, fair form, should hear the Grospel 
before they were judged for neglecting it; should know 
the value of the pearl before they were doomed for 
casting it away. But this doctrine is pitiless. When 
the man dies, no matter what the limitations, the difficul- 
ties, the disabilities, the natural miseries of his life, there 
is an end of him. If a part of him is kept alive in par- 
tial animation, it is not the man. The man is only 
restored for a time to his wholeness in the resurrection, 
to pass straight into the lake of fire on his way to the 
extinction of his being for ever. 

And the great heathen world around! The soul 
sickens and shudders when it contemplates the picture 
which is painted of their doom. The ' ferocious African 
warriors,' the ' Tartar hordes ' who have swooped upon the 
homes of civilisation, figure in the dread array of the 
great human horde that is destined to extinction. Well ! 
we know something of the ferocious African ; paint him 
as dark as you will, you cannot paint him dark enough. 
But read Moffat on 6 African Missions ; ' see what has been 
done for him by the intense and Christlike labours of 
that venerable patriarch of African evangelists. Nay, 
read in Sir S. Baker's 6 Ismailia,' what his ' forty thieves,' 



74 THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 

all 4 ferocious Africans,' were when lie mustered them, and 
what they became before he left them. Open his ' Albert 
N'yanza,' and see how the Latooka savages, finding one. of 
a marauding Nubian band, who had inflicted dreadful 
wrong on them, separated from his company, starved, and 
hiding himself in terror, took him to their huts, fed him, 
healed him, and conducted him to his camp in peace. 
Bead in Dr. Schweinfurth's travels — a Bongo native, 
who had joined the slave traders in a cruel invasion of the 
Dinka country, was dangerously wounded, and laid him- 
self down at the door of a Dinka's hut to die. The 
Dinka took him in, defended him from the fury of his 
people, fed and nursed him till he was healed, and then 
sent him under an escort home. 

Hear the witness of our glorious Livingstone, whose 
heart sleeps, where it ought to sleep, in the land he so 
passionately loved. c At Senna a slave woman was seized 
by a crocodile ; four Makololo rushed in unbidden and 
rescued her, though they knew nothing about her.' Ah ! 
brethren, how many of us, who number ourselves among 
the elect, would have dared it ? Some, blessed be Grod ; 
Christlike Christians who would give their lives for men, 
are not so rare in our world. And the world loves them 
and honours them unspeakably when it finds them. But 
how many of our loudest professors who challenge the 
world to judge of the Grospel by their lives, would have 
found a thousand reasons for thinking of themselves, 
their families, their work, rather than of the drowning 



THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



75 



slave ? Do you wonder that our great traveller, when he 
saw such signs as these, was pressed to say, 4 The deep 
dark question of what is to become of such as these, must, 
however, be left where we find it, believing that assuredly 
the Judge of all the earth will do right.' ' I clon't know 
how the great loving Father will bring all out right at 
last ; but He knows and will do it.' 

Here is a vision of what the ferocious African can 
become under the touch of a marts loving wisdom and 
strength. Is he never, never to have the chance of learn- 
ing what he could become under Christ's ? We know 
about the ferocious Africans — are they more ferocious 
though than the jealousies and hatreds, of the Church ? — 
and Christ knows ; and it was for such wretched, vile, 
savages as they seem, that Christ came to die. It was- 
the world, the world, not of saints but of rebels, the world 
of cruelty, greed, lust, and wrong, that the Lord came to 
pity, to help, and to save. Dare you believe that His 
love sees nothing before countless generations, through 
countless ages, each capable of yielding such pearls as 
these, but annihilation ? Think you that the heart that 
burst on Calvary feels no yearning to clasp them to its 
embrace ? Are the tears of Christ the rain that is for 
ever to fall on love's futile longings to express itself? 
Is the Cross the only force in this great Universe which 
is to be stricken to impotence by the hand of Death ? 

Let me say a word, too, on a practical point. We are 
told that man as man is mortal as the brutes. We are 



76 



THE DOCTRINE OE ANNIHILATION. 



told that a band of immortals, men of the order of the 
angels, differing in nature essentially from the herd, 
having a life over which death is powerless, while on the 
mass of common men death feeds at will, is in our midst. 
They should need he pure, lofty, god-like spirits, these 
men of a higher order of being ; the light of a Divine life 
should be seen very plainly playing about their brow, 
their breath should be felt to be redolent of the atmo- 
sphere of their native heaven. Once the common people 
heard Christ gladly ; for the people have a keen eye for 
spiritual beauty and power. But the complaint is now 
of the littleness, the narrowness, the selfishness, the 
worldliness of the sphere in which the only immortals 
of our race profess to dwell. It seems to me that they 
are lending a terrible support to the cause of the ma- 
terialists. They say to them plainly. You materialists 
are right ; man, body and soul, is mortal as a beast ; but 
here and there there is an immortal man to be met with, 
and the sign whereby he is to be known is the manifest 
life of (rod. Now, unless they show that life of Grod, 
unless they reveal the heavenly mind which bears its 
own witness to men that it has descended from a celestial 
sphere, the negations of their doctrine, in the judgment 
of men, will triumph, men will cease to believe in any 
immortality. They will simply blind the whole Christian 
host, and lead it helpless into the camp of its materialistic 
and atheistic foes. 

Do I hint a doubt of conversion by these words, of the 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



.77 



life which is born of Grod in the spirit ? Grod forbid ! 
Wherever I see a gleam of spiritual light, a glow of 
spiritual life, in a human brother, I hail it as the sign 
of the inworking of that Spirit through whom alone we 
can divinely live. But that Spirit is working with a 
largeness and freeness of operation in the human which 
we may not dare to limit, as if He divided that human 
into two great, organically, diverse worlds. I cling to the 
brotherhood ; I claim and hold to brotherhood of nature, 
of endowment, of responsibility, of destiny, with the 
poorest, the most ignorant, the most wretched, the most 
sinful of mankind. 

One fatal flaw in this system seems to be developed, by 
the effort of its advocates to connect the man who dies, 
body and spirit, in death, with the resurrection and the 
judgment. The man dies and is done with ; all returns 
to dust. But Grod, we are told, 6 secretly deviating from 
the ordinary course of nature ' — which implies, if it means 
anything, a Divine trick, but which, as it affects every 
member of the human race, is manifestly a Divine law 
with no secrecy about it — keeps some part alive ; not the 
4 person,' that will not appear till the resurrection, but 
some part which will establish a link of connection 
between the man who perished in death and the judgment 
day. Now, what is that something that lives on ? The 
man is dead, body and soul, he has ceased to be, as man. Is 
this new thing that appears a new creation, something 
called into being to take the place of the dead thing ? If 



78 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



so, it cannot be called to bear the burden of the dead. Or 
is it the soul, the human person, the person in which Paul, 
absent from the body, believed that he should be present 
with Christ, the person to which Christ addressed the 
promise, 6 This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise J ? 

If so, what we call the soul has passed unmaimed 
through death, and nothing can destroy it but the fiat of 
Grod. That idea I shall have to consider in the light of 
God's character and ways, in the next discourse. But if 
every man lives on after death 9 just as the righteous live 
on, let us have done with the notion of ' secret deviations' 
and 6 violations of natural order,' and accept frankly what 
this living on of every man through death necessarily 
implies, man's immortality. The theory fails, it seems to 
me, at every point. Tried Scrrpturally it fails, tried mo- 
rally it fails, tried metaphysically it fails, and fails utterly. 
It is a vain imagination, an idol of the mind, a dreary, 
but, thank Grod, a baseless dream. 

One word more. We are assured that this doctrine is 
£ full of comfort to many.' It shows how terrible is the 
pressure of the mediaeval doctrine, when many a noble, 
tender heart that I know, can find comfort in this. Com- 
fort ! Great Grod, was Thy Gospel sent to give comfort to a 
man, by the vision of the extinction of the great mass of 
his fellows, like gnats before a summer storm ? Mission- 
aries too are told to take it with them, to strengthen and 
cheer them for their work. To me the thought would be 
■an intolerable burden, that I was standing alone, a being 



THE DOCTRINE OE ANNIHILATION. 



79 



of an immortal nature, among myriads of struggling, suf- 
fering human animals, the great mass of whom must 
inevitably, after torment, be swept out of existence for 
ever. I might love them so tenderly as to be willing 
even to be 6 accursed from Christ ' for them, but I must 
not dare to call them brethren. There is a great chasm 
between our natures ; I, immortal, and by nature level 
with the angels ; they, mortal, and by nature level with 
the beasts. I could not face that as a missionary. But I 
could bear to feel, not without a solemn awe, but with a 
stedfast trust in Grod, as Livingstone felt, that my sad ? 
sinful brethren were passing into the presence of the 
Master who loved them, as I could never love them, and 
who must do right, right by the measures of Calvary, in 
all His decrees. But one thing as a missionary I would 
hold fast, whatever else might perish. The Saviour calls 
•the weakest and vilest of these idolaters His brethren ; 
and nothing should tear the sense of my oneness of nature 
with the poorest and saddest of these my brethren from my 
heart. 6 But God is not the Gron of the dead, but of the 
living; fou all live to Him.' Amen. 



80 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



IV. 

THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION IN THE 
LIGHT OF GOB'S CHARACTER AND WAYS. 

God sent not His Son into the "World to condemn the World, but that the 
World through Him might be saved. — John iii. 17. 

4 Ouk Saviour Jesus Christ hath abolished death, and 
hath brought life and immortality to light through the 
Gospel.' The abolition of death, according to the doc- 
trine of annihilation, means a sweeping destruction of 
the teeming millions of human mortals whom Christ 
died to redeem ; the bringing of life and immortality to 
light means, by this same rule, the miserable extinction 
of vast human masses whom the light but lit to judg- 
ment, torment, and the everlasting night. To me this is, 
I thank God, a wholly incredible Gospel. Nor is the 
representation which I have made in the least too strong. 
The matter, according to writers of this school, stands 
thus. The sentence, c In the day that thou eatest thereof 
thou shalt surely die,' meant, and could mean nothing 
else, than ' immediate and hopeless dissolution.' But 
Adam sinned and lived on. Why ? Because God, we 



THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



81 



are told by these expositors, suspended His sentence in 
mercy, that man might become the subject of redeeming* 
agencies, the acceptance of which would make him the 
possessor, through grace, of a blessing far larger than 
that which he had forfeited through sin. 

Adam and his race had the sentence suspended over 
them, until the results of these gracious agencies should 
be seen and their fruits secured. But that ministry of 
redemption altered, we are told, the conditions of life for 
all men. It secured for all, or inflicted upon all, whether 
righteous or wicked, heathen or Christian, prolonged ex- 
istence after the death of the body, and resurrection to the 
final judgment ; while for all who had not found life in 
Christ it involved the condemnation to torment, more or 
less terrible, and ultimate annihilation. The great mass 
of men, never having heard the name of Christ, have 
never had the faintest chance of finding life in Christ. 
Their condition, then, according to this scheme, is made 
infinitely more wretched and terrible through this ' system 
of mercy.' The sentence was death for sin ; death mean- 
ing, and being understood to mean, 6 immediate and hope- 
less dissolution.' Well, had the sentence been carried out 
there would have been an end of the race ; or at any rate, 
supposing that the years of the mortal life had been 
granted, men would have died under the sentence like an 
untimely birth, with one gasp of pain. The angels might 
have been, left to wonder over this abortive effort of the 
Supreme ; but all the horror which this doctrine heaps up 

Cr 



82 



THE DOCTRINE OE ANNIHILATION. 



would have been spared. But the Grospel, which is a 
ministry of mercy to the world, has, according to this 
doctrine, secured this for the great majority of the in- 
habitants of the world, that they shall live on after death 
in darkness and dread till the resurrection, when they 
shall be condemned still to live on for a space in horrible 
torments ; and then, when they have satisfied a vindictive 
justice, and then only, will Lethe flow over them and 
their miseries, and, let me add, their wrongs for ever. 

Thus the Gospel, which was to abolish death and to 
bring life and immortality to light, becomes the source of 
unutterable and incalculable misery to the great mass of 
mankind ; who, but for this Grospel which they were 
never within reach of hearing, would have suffered under 
the original sentence on transgression, would have dropped 
quietly out of existence, and have ceased to think, to feel, 
and to suffer for ever. Truly an awful Grospel for a Chris- 
tian man to preach to his fellow men ; a Grospel not in- 
credible only, but terrible, and certain to provoke the 
antagonism of all that is best in man's nature wherever it 
may be proclaimed. 

It is hinted, indeed, that there may be reasons un- 
known to us, connected with the order and the welfare of the 
great system of the Universe, which may justify and even 
demand this hard measure, not of justice, for there is no 
justice about it, but of severity, to the great multitude 
who are outside the Grospel pale. I can only say that it 
would be a horror to me to be connected with a Universe 



THE DOCTEINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



83 



which could demand such a process and be blessed by it ; 
and my own prayer would be that I might go swiftly to 
annihilation with my brethren, and be out of the region 
of the wrong and the misery for ever. 

This doctrine of annihilation seems to me to be very 
closely connected with the idea — which has ruled largely 
in the region of theological thought since the early days 
of the Church, though tempered and lightened in its 
bearings, until Calvinism arose, by the ' power of the 
keys ' — that Christ came to seek and to save the elect few 
ordained to believe on Him, while the rest were left un- 
pitied to rot in the corruption of sin, and to settle down 
into the everlasting night. The fewness of the saved, the 
multitude of the lost, are notions which we constantly 
meet with in this literature ; and there is too often a 
tone of lofty superiority to poor sinners, an exclusive 
thought and care for the righteous, as if the Universe 
existed for them alone, which • seem to me to be rebuked 
by almost every word and work of our Lord. From 
what Grospel do these teachers learn to press with the 
utmost stringency every text which seems to limit the 
possible activities of grace, towards those whom mercy 
once pitied upon earth, in the world which lies beyond ; 
and to ignore or to explain away every passage, even from 
Christ's own lips, which seems to open a larger hope ? 

' A good case,' says an advocate of this doctrine whose 
ability and earnestness none can question, ' is made out 
for almost everybody, in direct opposition to Christ's words 

G 2 



84 THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 

that " few find the narrow way that leadeth unto life, n 
that none shall escape destruction except those " who 
hear His sayings and do them." The comparative fewness 
of the saved, and the necessity of agonising to enter in at 
the strait gate, is one of the prominent lessons of the New 
Testament, and indeed of the whole Bible.' 1 Not a word 
here of the world-embracing purpose of the love of Grod 
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord ; of the one lost piece 
out of the ten ; of the one lost sheep out of the hundred, 
sought by the shepherd with weary, bleeding feet through 
all the paths of its wanderings ; of the word of Christ on the 
threshold of the last agony, hardly to be overlooked, one 
would have thought, when such a matter was in question, 
' And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all 
men unto Me ; ' or of the statements of Paul as to the 
meaning and method of Grod's dealings with the Jewish 
people, in which the Bible everywhere directs us to study 
the meaning and methods of His ways with the great 
human world, which are set forth in the eleventh chapter of 
the Epistle to the Eomans. No, these are all passed by, 
that a sentence of special stringency might be pressed to 
its uttermost meanings, and held forth as containing on 
this subject the epitome of the doctrine of the word of 
God. 

And it runs through the whole scale of the literature. 
In the pamphlets with which I am deluged — nine- 



1 Eev. E. White, Life in Christ, p. 45. 



THE DOCTKINE OP ANNIHILATION. 



85 



tenths of which seem to me to repeat with wearisome 
monotony the same vapid arguments and cruel criticisms, 
for they are all on the hard side — I find, for instance, 
every passage in the Psalms paraded and counted up which 
prophesies the destruction of the wicked, and describes 
the terrors of God's wrath against them ; while the texts 
which, I venture to say, occur more frequently than any 
other class of passages in the Psalms — these writers are 
fond of counting texts — describing (rod's mercy as 6 en- 
during for ever,' are wholly passed by. Why, even the 
Talmudists might rebuke them. In the literary Remains 
of Emmanuel Deutsch you will find (p. 147) that great 
master of Talmudic lore instructing us in the merciful 
aspects which, according to the Talmud, the Old Testa- 
ment presented to humanity at large. 4 Scripture said, 
"Ye shall walk in the words of the Lord." " But the Lord 
is a consuming fire — how can man walk in his way?" u By 
being," they answered, " as He is — merciful, loving, long- 
suffering. Mark on the first page of the Pentateuch Grocl 
clothed the naked — Adam ; and in the last He buried the 
dead — Moses. He heals the sick, frees the captives, does 
good to His enemies, and He is merciful both to the 
living and to the dead."' But more sharply and sternly, 
surely, does Christ's sentence of rebuke fall upon them, 
6 Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of ; for the Son 
of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save 
them.' In truth the doctrine is, to the heart's core of itj 
& Pharisaic doctrine, and can never be accepted in a 



86 



THE DOCTRDSE OB ANNIHILATION. 



Chiircii which has a firm grasp of its Christian mission, to 
help, to bless, and to save mankind. 

In the logical argument, of course, immense stress ig 
laid on the assertion, that most of the words which are 
applied in Scriptnre to describe the future doom of 
the wicked, are words which in their original and natural 
sense convey what we mean by destruction. It is freely 
allowed. It could hardly be otherwise. "When men pro- 
ject their thoughts into the spiritual and invisible sphere. 

d Ox ± 

they take the terms with which they are familiar in the 
visible material sphere, and enlarge their meanings to the 
measures of that larger world. Christianity added a new 
world of meaning to well-known and constantly-employed 
terms in the classical languages of antiquity. Among 
these were -'life* and 'death.' 'salvation. 5 and 6 ruin ' or 
' destruction. 5 Eefuse to recognise this spiritual enlarge- 
ment of meaning and a Christian terminoloow becomes 
impossible. 

But. it is saia, tiiese words which imply destruction are 
always used in the exact literal meaning. That, of course, 
is the question which has to be determined. Let us take 
a crucial instance and test it. We are assured that death 
has an exact and constant meaning — dissolution — and 
that Adam had the key to what the threatening of 
death meant in all that he saw around him in the world. 
There is a saying of Christ in which this word is employed 
•with emphasis, and from which we may gather whether 
om Lord meant that the natural meaning of the word 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



87 



should be enlarged to cover a correspondent experience 
in the spiritual sphere : 6 If a man keeps My saying he 
shall never see death/ 6 He that liveth and believeth in 
Me shall never die. 5 That word was spoken after the 
death of a man who believed and had suffered dissolution ; 
and who, restored to life for the moment, would see disso- 
lution again. To say that the word meant the same thing 
exactly as dissolution, only postponed to the end of count- 
less ages, when not a hint of it is dropped in the text, is 
mere trifling with language. It is manifest that our Lord 
meant to direct our thoughts to a new and Christian 
meaning of death, that which to the spirit, which the 
annihilationists are compelled to allow can live on and 
will live on through dissolution, corresponds to the expe- 
rience of death in the body — the absence of all that con- 
stitutes in the higher meaning of the word, its life. 
Here we have passages in the discourses of our Lord, in 
which we have a means of testing the sense which these 
annihilationist words are meant to bear in Christian doc- 
trine, and we find that the narrow literalness of these 
interpreters fails. 

But they are not true to their own meaning of words. 
If destruction were the punishment, and at death the man 
perished according to their scheme, at least they would 
have the virtue of consistency. But the real punishment 
is not destruction, but existence ; there is a sad separate 
state of souls for countless ages; there is resurrection, 
there are again unknown periods of torment, and then 



88 



THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



the destruction comes when the punishment is over, to 
bury the wreck of it from the sight of day. It is mere 
idleness to talk about death being the punishment, and 
death meaning destruction, with all this awful apparatus 
of torment behind. 

But the terms which are constantly associated with these 
words, whose natural meaning would imply destruction, 
ought to warn us, as in the case of the language of Christ 
already quoted, that there is a larger spiritual meaning to 
be discerned. Contentious literalists, one would think; must 
recognise that c everlasting punishment ' is about the most 
misleading term that could possibly be employed, if what 
was to be understood was literal destruction. The phrases 
in question are constantly employed with qualifying 
adjuncts which indicate a condition of consciousness, and 
which imperatively point us to this spiritual meaning. If 
destruction were meant, it seems incredible that it should 
so constantly be associated with images of pain and terror 
implying a conscious subject. Paul in a remarkable pas- 
sage, in a profoundly argumentative epistle, describes the 
future of sinners as an experience of 6 indignation and 
wrath, tribulation and anguish,' which determines the 
sense w T hich he puts on c perish.' I ask any one to read 
for himself the words of the New Testament, keeping, if 
he can, all this word- wrangle out of his mind, and judge 
for himself whether it does not seem to anticipate for all 
men a condition of conscious existence, in which the 
issues of life are to be worked out through eternity. 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



89 



But the literalists, like other theological schools, are 
literal only when it suits them. In the parable of Dives 
there is a description of a man in Hades with lips and 
tongue. If the letter is to be pressed, here is a conclu- 
sive argument against the notion of this school, about a 
separate state of disembodied spirits between death and 
the resurrection. We may say in passing that Paul knew 
nothing about these disembodied spirits. ' Not unclothed 
but clothed upon,' is the vision opened to him of our 
experience in dying. And this parable is clearly against 
the notion. Whereupon an able writer of the school, 
already referred to, argues, quite soundly I think, in the 
following words : ' The argument that language is em- 
ployed appropriate to the incarnate condition, and alto- 
gether unsuited to the condition of disembodied spirits, 
will not appear of much weight to him who reflects that 
if the subject of the intermediate state was to be spoken 
of at all, it must necessarily be invested with drapery 
suited to strike the imaginations of " men in the flesh," 
who have no cognisance of a purely immaterial world, and 
no terms fitted to describe it.' 1 Nothing could be more 
just; it is exactly the principle for which we contend. 
We are all like little children sporting or trembling on 
the shore of that great unknown ocean, and the Bible 
speaks to us as to children, while it lifts us, educates us, 
to be men. It uses words to help our imagination as 



1 Life in Christ, p. 229. 



90 THE DOCTRINE OE ANNIHILATION. 



being yet in the flesh : but it demands of us that we shall 
lift up our minds to interpret them, by what it reveals to 
us of the measures of that mysterious, unsearchable, 
spiritual world. 

But before I pass from this part of my subject, let me 
say a word on the method which I pursue. Many will no 
doubt be surprised and puzzled because I am not con- 
ducting my argument by means of elaborate and minute 
textual criticism. The reason is this. There is a certain 
number of texts bearing on this subject, of which the most 
important may almost be counted on the fingers, the 
meaning of which is fiercely debated. Most of them 
contain terms which are ambiguous or perplexing ; and 
each party contends strenuously that the word which 
looks their way should be regarded as the key. One 
term; for instance, will imply perishing: another will 
seem to imply sustained consciousness. But the point on 
which the stress is laid depends entirely on the theological 
prepossessions of the writer. It is easy for the experienced 
to prophesy the interpretations of any particular school. 
It will bring its creed to bear upon it, that is the view of 
the whole counsel of Grod which it gathers from the study 
of the Bible at large. This may be easily illustrated by 
a simple instance. In 1 Tim. v. 6 St. Paul describes 
one living in pleasure as ; dead while she liveth.' Here, 
it seems to us, is an indisputable instance of the spiritual 
meaning of the word c death 5 — a woman dead while alive. 
±>o, say our opponents, the metaphor here is in the tense, 



THE DOCTEINE OF ANNIHILATION. 91 

not in the word. She is described as dead because she 
will be dead in time. This seems to us quite idle, but it 
is really the interpretation of the theology of the inter- 
preter. It is for this reason that I have endeavoured 
to treat of those general considerations, drawn from 
the whole Bible, which may guide your study and inter- 
pretation of the particular texts which may be under 
debate. 

And now we will look at the doctrine in its broader 
moral aspects, and see what light is cast upon it by the 
great ideas of Eevelation, by the character of God, and 
His aims and methods in the spiritual government of 
mankind. 

The first thing which strikes us is the enormous in- 
crease in the penalty of transgression. The original sen- 
tence was simple and clear : 6 In the day that thou eatest 
thereof thou shait surely die.' They tell us that this means 
simply and plainly ' dissolution, 5 the extinction of the 
life of the creature man. I wholly dissent from this. I 
believe that the sentence had a far deeper meaning, but 
I take their own interpretation. Dissolution seemed to 
the all-wise and almighty Poller the meet penalty for 
transgression. We can understand the justice of that. 
Man Avas made to know and to glorify Grocl by loving 
obedience ; if he chose to rebel, we can understand that 
a suffering, struggling life and then annihilation might 
be the just penalty. But behind this dissolution there is 
a vast and terrible array of torments, which may keep the 



"92 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



being for untold ages on the rack of intolerable pain, I 
know that I shall be told that this enlargement of the 
penalty is the inevitable concomitant of that Eedemp- 
tive system under which the first sentence was suspended ; 
involving the choice between a larger blessing and a 
darker doom. 

But it is confessed that this offer of mercy has been 
made to but a little fraction of the human race. The rest 
have hardly sinned 6 after the similitude of Adam's trans- 
gression, 5 for the law to them was far less clearly and 
directly explained. Adam had it from the lips of God ; he 
sinned, and came under the sentence which, we are told, 
meant the extinction of his being, and which Grod re- 
garded as the appropriate punishment of his guilt. But 
the great mass of mankind gather the law against which 
they sin but dimly from the witness of the conscience and 
the traditions of the past, which constantly lead them 
astray. Yet, we are told, they are subjected, without a 
word of warning, to this tremendous extension of penalty 
for what is really mere venial and pitiable sin. It is no 
longer dissolution, but misery in Hades, then resurrection 
to judgment, then the lake of fire, and then only at last, 
after all this agony, the doomsman's stroke. One fails to 
discern here the faintest recognition of the simplest ideas 
of right. The conduct presented here is the purest ty- 
ranny. It outrages every sentiment of justice which God 
has planted and keeps alive, as part of the image of 
Himself, in human hearts. 



THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



9£ 



Behind this another difficulty looms darkly. 

The first sentence was death. Man either was origi- 
nally, or became by transgression, mortal as the brutes. 
He died, and there was an end of him. At death his 
consciousness, his power of repeating his transgression 
and harming himself or his fellows^ expired. Is there 
not something at which one shudders in the thought of 
his being brought to life again, after enduring the penalty 
which Grod ordained for his transgression, for nothing but 
to suffer; literally having a new life put into him by the 
direct fiat of Grod, and in violation of 6 the natural order,' 
which disposed of him finally in death ? A being living* 
as a sinner a wretched life, crying like the first flagrant 
transgressor, ' My punishment is greater than I can bear,' 
and then perishing — that were a sad enough picture. 
But this pitiless doctrine brings the man to life again, 
when he has, according to their theory, ceased to be, 
simply that he may be tormented. It dooms him to 
exist in shuddering dread in Hades till earth's sad history 
is ended ; and then to rise to judgment, with the certainty 
that, after maddening awhile in the lake of fire, he will 
fall back into the annihilation from which he was re- 
covered, that he might endure the beating of all this 
storm of pain. 

It is not a question of a free being endowed with an 
immortal nature, choosing, after full warning that eternal 
issues were waiting on the decisions of his will, rebellion 
rather than submission, pain rather than blessedness, hell 



'94 



THE DOCTRINE OE ANNIHILATION. 



rather than heaven. That were a terrible picture of the 
future of the Universe, if it presented the destiny of the 
great mass of mankind. But that is not comparable in 
horror to the picture here — a creature fairly dead, having 
paid the original penalty which God attached to his trans- 
gression, brought to life again simply and solely to suffer. 
Human governments in their mercy have abolished tor- 
ture before death. However flagrant the crime, no 
Christian Government dares postpone the execution of 
the last sentence that the criminal may be tormented. 
A human monarch, who should keep the criminals on 
whom sentence of death has been pronounced, alive that 
they might agonise under the horror of their condition, 
and taste keen torture before the doomsman's stroke, 
would wither on his throne under the execration of man- 
kind. And yet this is the aspect under which the God and 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is rich in mercy, 
is presented to the world. 

Xo plea of satisfaction to the monarch's government 
or of warning to other transgressors, would be allowed on 
earth to stand as valid, in justification of the torture of 
a criminal on whom the sentence of death has been 
passed. And it is Christianity which has taught us this 
benignant lesson, and has made us understand at last that 

Earthly power doth then shew likest Grocl's 
When mercy seasons justice. 

Yet here are Christian teachers instructing us that all 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



95 



this is a mistake ; and that the ruthless principle which 
Christ's Gospel has at last constrained us to abandon upon 
earth, reigns in heaven and through eternity. 

I know that I shall be assured that the interests of 
the Universe demand this exhibition of the wrath of (rod 
against transgressors. But for whose benefit ? All that 
can sin has been killed off ! Who remains to profit by it ? 
(rod's mind about sin was declared once and for ever to 
the whole Universe, when he made the soul of the incar- 
nate Word an offering for the sins of the world. For 
whom is this spectacle of torment prepared ? If I am 
assured, as Christian men have dared to say, that the 
saints will regard it with satisfaction, I call to mind two 
blessed ones whom the world honours with its profoundest 
reverence and love, praying that their names might be 
4 blotted out from the Book of Life,' if their sinning, 
perishing brethren might but be saved; and I picture 
them turning away from that holocaust of agony in 
heartbroken despair. 

There is a third aspect of the doctrine, which concerns 
the principle on which the punishment is administered. 
This aspect presents it, to my mind, in colours, if pos- 
sible, yet darker still. Men are kept alive and raised up 
,nt the resurrection, and tormented in a lake of fire, that 
Divine justice may have its full satisfaction, and until 
Divine justice is fully satisfied ; and then they are swept 
to annihilation. We are told further, and most justly, 
that the decrees of Grod are not arbitrary; that it is not a 



96 



THE DOCTRINE OE ANNIHILATION. 



matter of will but of Divine necessity, the springs of 
"which are internal, not external, to the nature of God, 
that He should exact the full penalty of transgression. 
The soul that sins must be visibly and terribly punished ; 
in the nature of things, it is said, it must be so. I make 
no objection to this representation. I believe as solemnly 
as a man can believe that ' the wrath of God is revealed 
from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness 
of men.' I believe in the full meaning of the Saviour's 
words, 4 He that believeth in the Son hath everlasting* 
life : and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, 
but the wrath of God abideth on him ; ' though again I 
note that this is a misleading phrase if ' life ' means only 
6 existence,' and the ' wrath of God ' is to 6 abide ' on a 
creature who has utterly ceased to be. 

These souls of sinners, then, are raised up that they 
may pass into the lake of fire. There they are to be tor- 
mented till they have paid the full penalty of their sin. 
What sin ? Do they continue sinning ? Each moment 
then adds to their guilt, and necessarily prolongs their 
punishment. Is sin in the other world a less guilty thing 
than sin in this world ? If it was impossible that God 
should dispose of the sinner after the sin of this world 
by a stroke of annihilation, without these horrors of tor- 
ment, how is it possible by this rule that the punishment of 
sin should ever end ? Each moment is a fresh provocation 
of Divine wrath, a fresh challenge to God to heat the furnace 
hotter, and to press down more heavily His terrible hand. 



THE DOCTKINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



97 



If it be said that Grod is master of the demands of His 
own attributes, and may think after a time that the sinner 
has suffered enough and drop the merciful stroke, on what 
principle of justice is that possible after countless ages, 
during which there is constantly fresh sin demanding fresh 
punishment, and not possible at death, when one sharp 
stroke might end the sinner and his anguish for ever ? 

Again, the sinner is to be tormented until justice is 
satisfied, until the righteous Judge says ' Enough.' On 
what possible principle of righteousness can the sufferer, 
when he has suffered all, and has £ paid the last farthing,' 
be further doomed to annihilation ? Justice has had its 
will — exacted its utmost. Has the atonement made on 
Calvary, 4 that men might not perish but have everlasting 
life,' no help for them, then ? Is the love of Christ the 
only power that becomes paralysed by the ages, and has 
the hand of Christ no strength to hold back the sufferers, 
when justice has done with them, from dropping dead into 
the pit ? 

Or, should the punishment soften them, and make 
them see the folly and madness of their rebellion, waken- 
ing some longing thought and hope in their tortured 
hearts that there may be mercy for them yet in the in- 
finite and everlasting mercy, it were cruel, wanton 
mockery of bare justice to hand them over to destruction, 
when their punishment is ended and Justice has had her 
satisfaction, and deep dishonour to the love that seeks the 
' broken reeds ' and 6 smouldering embers ' to rescue, 

ir 



98 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



restore, and save. What weary waste of desolation were 
this, that Heaven makes in the Universe, calling it peace ! 
When the wretched souls have suffered all that is ordained, 
and Justice stays the tormentor's hand, then we are told 
that the Grod who swears by Himself that He ' desireth 
not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn 
from his unrighteousness and live,' gives them no chance 
of turning, but sweeps them all out into the everlasting 
night. Is that what you expect us to believe ? 

One word more on this part of my subject before I 
pass on. I may be told that I am talking in ignorance of 
the destroying nature of sin ; that it naturally blinds 
the eyes, dulls the senses, poisons life in the springs, and 
wears men down into moral and physical impotence and 
idiocy, so that at last there is a mere wreck, incapable of 
being saved. We none of us know much about this in 
its aspects and bearings beyond the grave. We can only 
see that sin seems as strong, and the devil as active, aftei 
all these ages as at first. But I take the picture as it is 
painted, and I sicken as I behold it. There are an innu- 
merable multitude of wretched tortured creatures, whom 
Christ once so loved as to die to save them, dragging on a 
wasted, withered, idiotic existence, more pallid, ghastly, 
helpless, lifeless, as the periods of their punishment roll 
on ; but kept alive, moping, mowing, looking out through 
bleared and soulless eyes on the great sea of agony around 
them, and dying still, till in sheer rottenness they drop 
into the pit. And as I gaze on this picture the thought 



THE DOCTRINE OE ANNIHILATION. 



99 



will rise, was there no hand in the Universe merciful 
enough to draw the sheet over this long and ghastly 
death-agony ; had the eyes that rained tears on doomed 
Jerusalem no drops to shed on this vast world of living, 
writhing, festering corruption? Had the lips that once 
prayed even for the murderers, 6 Father, forgive them,' no 
pleading entreaty, 4 Drop the veil over this spectacle of 
horror ; end this long, long death-agony by a merciful 
stroke ! At least let them die at once and be buried in 
darkness ; but this sight of the long suicide of sin is too 
horrible to be endured.' 

I cannot trace the doctrine further ; the heart saddens 
and sickens at the vision- The doctrine presents to us a 
picture of the dealings of the Grod who is Love, whose 
justice, holiness, and righteousness must therefore be the 
modes of His love, which I am persuaded would make 
those who paint it shudder, if they could fairly grasp it 
in all its bearings and issues ; and which must drive men 
to embrace eagerly the alternative of atheism if they 
were shut up to believe in such a God. 

And now we must endeavour to take a yet wider view 
of the bearings of the doctrine, and look at it in the light 
of the larger ideas of Eevelation, and the methods and 
ends of Grod in the spiritual government of mankind. 

I find the heart's core, the marrow, of the Grospel in the 
Lord's own words, 6 Grod so loved the world that He gave 
His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him 
might not perish, but have everlasting life.' And lest any 

H 2 



100 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



should say, as Christian men in all ages hare, alas ! been quick 
to say, the world there means those predestined to believe, 
the Lord adds, 6 For Grod sent not his Son into the world 
to condemn the world, but that the world through Him 
might be saved.' What He meant by the world He de- 
clared by ' keeping company with publicans and sinners ; ' 
by 6 seeking and saving the lost ; ' by bringing forth c the 
best robe ' for the returning prodigal, and calling 6 the 
weary and heavy laden ' to lay their burden on His heart. 
And lest the circle of an elect nation should claim Him 
and make in His own lifetime a caste of His kingdom, 
He lifted up His eyes over the wide world and declared, 
' Many shall come from the east and from the west, from 
the north and from the south, and shall sit down with 
Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of God.' 

I beg you to consider what this doctrine makes of the 
world-embracing ]ove and purpose of the Lord. All perish 
at death who have not known and believed that 4 Jesus 
is the Christ, the Saviom* of the world.' At death their 
life is done with ; if it is prolonged it is because Grod 
chooses to prolong it, that they may suffer. The final scene 
is described in the following powerful words : c How fear- 
ful and amazing the spectacle of the unregenerate things, 
arising in the nakedness and confusion of unpardoned sin, 
standing before God with the ghastly paleness of despair 
depicted on their countenances, and awaiting in direful 
silent agony the thunder of their great condemnation! 
There shall be ranged the unnumbered barbarous and 



THE DOCTRINE OE ANNIHILATION". 101 



half-civilised nations, all that the northern hive has 
poured forth on the seats of luxury and commerce through 
4,000 years ; all the savage hordes of Central Asia ; the 
ferocious warriors of teeming Africa, America, and the 
Pacific Isles. . . 1 

Well, if we are not to deny the faith, and to destroy 
the central idea of the Gospel, these are the beings whom 
the merciful Father, who sent them with a frail nature 
into a sinful world, so pitied and loved in their sin and 
wretchedness, that He who ' was with God, who was God,' 
endured unutterable anguish and intolerable shame to 
save them. He claimed them as His own by the awful 
sacrifice of Calvary; the great aim and work of His 
mediatorial kingdom is the bringing them to Himself. 
Now God forbid that, in pointing out the difficulties into 
which the doctrine of the annihilationists seems to plunge 
us, I should undervalue the difficulties which on any 
system beset the consideration of the state of the heathen, 
and the actual order or disorder of the world. There is 
difficulty enough everywhere ; there is mystery enough 
everywhere, dark mystery, in which many a feeble faith 
gets lost. Christ loves these outcast heathen masses ; and 
remember that we have heathen, ignorant heathen, within 
our own borders, while we speak of the great heathen 
world. Christ loves them, Christ died to save them, and 
yet generation after generation, age after age, millennium 



1 Life in Christ, p. 230. 



102 



THE DOCTEIXE OF ANNIHILATION. 



after millennium, the whole mass of them live, sin, suffer, 
die, without hearing His name, or feeling one soft touch 
of the mercy of His Gospel. 

It is the fault of the Church, you say. But think of 
its being left at the mercy of such timid, halting, wrang- 
ling, selfish men and women as we are, we of the Church, 
I mean, whether the heathen in countless millions should 
pass from life to be tormented in the lake of fire, or 
should become, 4 through union with the Prince of Life, 
component parts of the immortal system of the universe ;' 1 
to borrow a magniloquent description of that immortal 
caste, to which we are called, from which they are shut 
out. There is a deep mystery about it, but I can see a 
light shining through the gloom. If we are able to 
believe, on the ground not only of the hints which are 
dropped in Scripture, but on the broader ground of the 
love of Grod which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, which 
c will have all men to be saved, and to come to a know- 
ledge of the truth,' that in the future of the boundless 
Universe and of their immortal being, the truth here 
hidden from them may be made known, and the love on 
earth untasted may shed its purifying and quickening 
gifts on their souls, so that they too shall know, and 
feel, and be drawn to Christ before their destiny is settled — 
then some vision of the vast range of the system of mercy 
of which the Cross is the symbol elevates and gladdens 



1 Life in Christ, p. 185. 



THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



103 



our hearts. We can understand, then, how in the vast 
scheme of Providence, which has eternity to work out its 
benignant designs, this 6 casting away of some,' the great 
outcast heathen world, may be the beginning of a glorious 
ministry of mercy ; and may be allowed, with all its present 
darkness and sadness, to draw forth and to educate that 
spirit of ministry which, caught from Christ, is to be the 
joyful task of the blessed in eternity. One can understand 
it if it is the preparation for the beyond. 

But dare you believe, as this pitiless doctrine would 
compel you to believe, that God can mean what He says 
when He declares His love to the world, 6 yea to the rebel- 
lious also, 9 and yet can leave the great world with all its 
teeming millions to perish in death, without even hearing 
the sound of His Gospel ? And they die in death for ever 
to all hope of hearing it, or of knowing the meaning of 
mercy; for all that survives of these ignorant ones 
through death is but a half human nature, reserved for 
resurrection to judgment, the lake of fire, and the eternal 
night. It is utterly impossible to believe in the destiny 
of the mass of mankind which is thus presented, unless we 
are to expunge the love of God from the Gospel, and can 
expel mercy from the heart of Christ for ever. 

And dare you contemplate this magnificent triumph 
of death ? Death abolished by Christ ! Why, death is 
the victor. Heaven may rejoice over its thousand res- 
cued ; hell over its ten thousand, nay, ten million, slain. 
Almighty love wrests a handful from destruction • hate, 



104 



THE DOCTEINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



mightier still than love, shrieks its paean over the human 
hordes that it sweeps into the pit. I will not press the 
comparison between the quality of those in all ages who 
proclaim themselves the immortals, and the crowd which 
perishes like the brutes. But the 6 angers that rage in 
celestial minds' have always conspicuously challenged 
the scornful attention of mankind. Tested by the pure 
touchstone of the life of Christ, few, few indeed, of the 
countless human throngs in any age wear the guise and 
breathe the breath of that immortal sphere. While the 
heart sickens at the thought of the innumerable priceless 
pearls of courage, honour, loyalty, devotion, self-sacrifice, 
and charity, which this doctrine would sweep wholesale 
into the pit — I claim them for Christ, and Christ will have 
them ; though still, as of old, His wasteful disciples 
would drive them away. 

I have described as an c immortal caste 5 these pos- 
sessors of a nature which relates them to the ' immortal 
system of the Universe, 9 while all other men belong with 
the brutes to the system which perishes in the dust. 
The phrase is objected to, because 6 they are very humble, 
gentle, and diffident, and but seekers after life,' to whom 
it would apply. I regret that I must adhere to the term. 
Beings of a nature so essentially distinguished from 
humanity at large, cannot hide themselves under the 
veil of humility and self-distrust. The thing is a tre- 
mendous reality, if it is anything ; a distinction so vast 
as that between the nature of the angels and the nature 



THE DOCTBINE OF ANNIHILATION. 



105 



of the beasts, cannot pass among men unnoted and 
unknown. It is a caste, and in its deadliest form — a 
spiritual caste ; and the caste tone and temper tinges to 
my mind to a very painful extent almost the whole of the 
literature of the school which has passed under my notice. 
I gladly believe that this humility, gentleness, com- 
passion, and charity is present largely in the hearts of its 
members. I pray them to make it more manifest in their 
word and doctrine, by believing that Christ has relations 
far closer and tenderer with these poor human outcasts 
whom they label the 6 wicked ' than any of them dream ; 
and that He meant what He said, and all that He said, 
when He proclaimed the Gospel, 6 God sent not His Son 
into the world to condemn the world, but that THE 
WORLD, through Him, might be saved. 5 



106 



THE GOSPEL OF LOVE. 



V. 

THE GOSPEL OF LOVE. 

Eor this purpose the Son of G-od was manifested, that He might destroy 
the works of the devil. — 1 John iii. 8. 

Life in Christ ! Here I am entirely at one with the 
school whose doctrine of annihilation seems to me equally 
degrading to man and dishonouring to Grod. 1 Their nega- 
tions I protest against with ail the energy which I can 
command ; the great affirmation, life in Christ alone, I 
hold as firmly as they do to be (rod's truth. I may be 
permitted, however, to express my amazement at the 
attitude and tone of discoverers which they assume in 
proclaiming it. I find it so plainly written in the 
Grospel that whoso runs may read it ; it is a truth broad 
and clear as the sunlight, and belongs not to a sect or a 
school, but to the universal Church : ' He that believeth 
in the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not 
the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth 
on him.' It is true for ever, true on earth, true in all 
ages, true in all worlds. But 6 life ' has manifestly in 
this passage a larger and nobler meaning than existence. 

1 Except that I protest against their miserably small and material in- 
terpretation of the word 'life.' 



THE GOSPEL OF LOVE. 



107 



Life means that which makes existence blessed. The 
idea of the wrath of Grod abiding on a being who has no 
existence, is so incongruous that nothing but a very strong* 
theological interest in a dogma could blind men to the 
incongruity. To live, for a spirit, is to know Him who is 
the Life ; to be drawn to the fellowship of the mind and 
the spirit of Christ Jesus is to live, is to taste the joy of 
that life with a view to which Grod endowed the being 
whom He 6 made in His own image ' with an immortal 
nature, and which He has revealed to man in His Son. 

4 Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, 
which is Jesus Christ/ ' There is none other name given 
among men whereby we must be saved,' here or in any 
world. And this life in Christ is blessed and eternal. Let 
not your heart be troubled about this passage or that 
passage, as though your hope rested on a single sentence 
of the word of Grod. The testimony of the Bible as to 
the eternal beauty, joy, and glory of the life which is in 
Christ is not ample only, but exuberant. The life is one 
with Christ : 6 Because I live, ye shall live also.' It is 
blessed as Christ's, it is eternal as Christ's : c He that liveth 
and believeth in Me shall never die.' I refer to these texts, 
which are but a few out of the many emphatic and preg- 
nant passages which I might quote, in which the eternal 
blessedness of the righteous is presented as a truth firm 
and lasting as the throne of Grod, because I believe that a 
timid and selfish fear, lest if you set a limit to everlasting 
punishment you set also a limit to everlasting life, has 



108 



THE GOSPEL OE LOVE. 



had a large influence in determining the doctrine of the 
Church. But the blessedness rests on foundations too 
firm to be shaken ; while the term eternal, which, accord- 
ing to the balanced methods of Hebrew expression, freely 
employed by our Lord in parables— that is, poetic pictures 
and drapings of facts — is applied also to the punishment of 
the wicked, is open to such interpretations as we may be 
constrained to affix to it by the larger revelation of the 
whole word of Grod. 

I believe, then, firmly with the writers who hold this 
theory of annihilation, that the only way of blessing to a 
human spirit is faith in Christ. To know Him is to live ; 
to see in Him no beauty that we should desire Him, to 
have no sympathy with His life, no sense of His love, is 
to be dead while living, as Paul says, here or in any 
world. 

The life which man was made to know and to enjoy, is 
born of the wedding of that which he is and has by 
nature to that which Grod imparts in Christ, that he may 
be born again, born into a new and blessed relation to the 
Father and to the spiritual and eternal world. It is the 
fruit of the blending of the human will with the Divine 
will, after the manner which Paul can only describe by 
what looks like a logical contradiction : 6 Work out your 
own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is Grod that 
worketh in you to will and to do of His good pleasure." 
And this was the purpose of Grod in the creation of man ; 
he was made that he might be redeemed. He was made in 



THE GOSPEL OF LOVE. 



109 



God's image. His child, in a sense which no other creature 
can even faintly share ; but he was made a child that he 
might become in a yet higher sense a son, might enter 
into his Father's counsels, search the purposes of His mind, 
and respond to the yearnings of His heart, eternally. 
And to this life of sonship Grod calls the race. Man, as 
man, is chosen in Christ, and called. ' Grod so loved the 
world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that the world 
through Him might be saved.' He 6 will have all men to 
be saved ; ' He will have His Gospel ' preached to all 
nations ; ' and all, the most wretched, ignorant, and sinful 
everywhere, nay, even the murderers of the Prince of 
Life, He claims in Christ, and seeks, by ways that we 
little comprehend, to draw to His heart. 

The question may fairly occur to those who see in 
evolution the key to the order of Creation, is not the 
struggle for life carried up to this higher sphere ? Through 
all the ascending stages of Creation there is fierce struggle 
for existence ; multitudes of the weaker perish that one 
stronger may survive, and struggle up to the next stage, 
to be crushed by a stronger in turn. Would it not be in har- 
mony with this order, that great multitudes of these higher 
creatures, with their lofty endowments, should perish, 
in order that the strongest, the elect natures, might live 
on, and people this higher world? It is a thought which 
profanes wholly the mystery of Eedemption, and puts the 
Saviour 6 to an open shame.' The struggle for life rules 
through all the ascending stages of the Creation, with 



110 



THE GOSPEL OE LOVE. 



a sternness which we should call terrible, but that the 
creatures are manifestly glad in their existence ; no 
Q reason, looking before and after,' kills or even clouds 
their joy; while the result is a procession of life, ever 
onward and upward, which fills the heart with wonder 
and praise. 

But the perpetuation of this principle as the principle 
of order and progress in the human sphere, the sphere of 
conscious^ intelligent, forecasting, and intensely sensitive 
beings, would be simply horrible. In the human sphere, 
which this strain and struggle of the groaning Creation 
has evolved at last, a higher principle of order appears. 
In man the struggle for life ends, the ministry of life 
begins. As a creature sharing with the creatures, the 
struggle for existence enters as a powerful factor into 
man's life in this mortal sphere. But God meets him 
at once with a nobler lesson. He has embedded the first 
lines of it in the very constitution of our nature, He has 
brought forth the full form of it in the redemptive mis- 
sion of His Son. In man there is the disposition and the 
desire to pity, to help, to save. Those Makololo who 
plunged in among the crocodiles to save the poor slave 
woman, were turning their backs on the struggle for 
existence, and their faces towards the ministry of life. 
And Christ explains and justifies it. He came to reveal 
man to himself ; the Son of Man declares Grod's purpose 
in the form and the scale after which man's nature is 
made. The Highest came not to secure the survival of 



THE GOSPEL OE LOVE. 



Ill 



the strongest, but the salvation of the weakest. The Son 
of Man ' came to seek and to save the lost.' 6 Ye see 
your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after 
the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called. 
But Grocl hath chosen the foolish things of the world to 
confound the wise ; and (rod hath chosen the weak things 
of the world to confound the things which are mighty ; 
and base things of the world, and things which are des- 
pised hath Grod chosen, yea, and things which are not, 
to bring to nought things that are.' 

The recognition of this as the distinctly human quality, 
the function whereby the human asserts its relation to 
the higher, the spiritual world, is universal ; men and 
peoples are called 6 humane ' who have it, ' inhuman 5 
who have it not. The order and development of society 
are based upon it. We call communities in a high sense 
civilised, in which this duty of the strong to the weak, 
this community of interests in classes, orders, and souls, 
receives some fair measure of recognition ; and we estimate 
their true progress in civilisation, not by arts or arms, 
but by the welfare, the industry, order, intelligence, and 
growth, of the great mass of the community. This 
principle, the heart of which is love — love, the spring of 
which is Divine — is found to be that which compacts and 
edifies States. A nation composed of an order of freemen 
and a great herd of slaves, however cultivated, wealthy, 
and powerful it might seem, would have in it, as is now 
perfectly well understood, the seeds of all possible social 



112 



THE GOSPEL OE LOVE. 



miseries and disorders, and of inevitable and rapid 
decay. 

And it is a grand mistake to suppose that Christianity 
first made known this principle to man ; like the still 
drearier mistake of imagining that man knew nothing of 
an immortal nature within him, till the Grospel proclaimed 
it. The Old Testament is full of the revelation of this 
principle of order. The structure of Jewish society was 
built upon it. Eead Deuteronomy xv., Leviticus xxv., 
Psalms IxxiL, Isaiah lviii. and lxi., and see how in the 
sight of Grod this was the key to the human order from the 
beginning ; and how the whole aim of His education of 
humanity from the first, was to lift man consciously above 
the creature level to which the creature part of him 
naturally clings, and in which the struggle for existence 
reigns, and to train him to understand this higher law, 
this law of ministry, which is distinctly the law of the 
human sphere. That he might master and develop this 
law, G-od made man in His own image, and constituted 
him in his nature the link between two worlds. 

And Grod, who calls man to this life with all its blessed 
burdens and glorious toils, comes forth to help him. He 
gives to him both the pattern and the inspiration of this 
cherishing compassion, this healing, helping, and saving- 
purpose and endeavour, by the manifestation of His own 
all-enduring, all-sacrificing love. There is One in the 
Universe who must 6 in all things have the pre-eminence,' 
the First-born, ' by whom the Father made the worlds ; ' 



THE GOSPEL OF LOVE. 



He became for us, that He might lead us in the higher 
path, the first-born of ministry ; He was first in toil ? in 
burden, in pain, in sorrow, in fear, in death, that He 
might be the first, the leader of the band, of the healers, 
the helpers, the saviours, here and throughout eternity. 
In revealing the life, this higher human life, to which 
man rises by the fellowship of the Son of Grod, and which 
is truly described as a renewing, a renewing of man after 
the image of Him that created him, the Lord revealed 
Love : ' Hereby have we knowledge of love, because He 
laid clown His life for us. 5 The highest, the Son of Grod, 
6 came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to 
give His life a ransom for many.' It was not an expedient 
to meet an accidental fracture of the Divine purpose in 
the Creation ; it is everywhere set forth as the manifesta- 
tion of that which is most Grodiike in Grod ; that which 
He is, essentially and eternally — Love, Love that must 
ever seek and save. 

In working out the Father's everlasting purposes of 
mercy, the Lord endured joyfully unutterable anguish 
and shame. That He might lift the burden of sin from 
guilt-crushed consciences, He took on Himself the whole 
weight of it ; though He groaned under it in a horror of 
darkness, in which the sense even of the Father's love 
was for the moment lost. That He might be able to 
save to the uttermost each helpless and wretched sinner 
of our race, He became ' bone of our bone, flesh of our 
flesh ; ' He fathomed to the depths all experiences of 

I 



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Iranian care, pain, and bitterness, and drank the cup of 
life's sorrow to the dregs. Eising, He bore our human 
nature, with all the rich experience which He had won, 
6 to the heavenly places,' where He reigns on His media- 
torial throne, wearing still the stigmata of Calvary, to 
make the purpose of the Incarnation and Passion trium- 
phant ; to make the love which ' endured the cross and 
despised the shame,' the supreme power in this Universe, 
pitying, helping, healing, saving, ruling, in all worlds 
and through all eternity. And this is the life of Grod — 
He is Grod the Saviour. This legend is ever on His 
crown, 6 Mighty to save.' 6 For I have no pleasure in the 
death of him that dieth,' saith the Lord Grod ; ' wherefore 
turn yourselves and live ye.' 6 He keepeth truth for 
ever,' the truth of His nature, the truth of His purposes ; 
He cannot change, He cannot lie, He cannot repent. He 
is love ; He must save. 

And now in the light of that everlasting mercy which 
lias its spring in the inner essential nature of Grod, look 
at your theology either of eternal torment, or of vindictive 
torment for a season and then the doomsman's stroke at 
last. God loves the poorest and wretchedest sinners of 
our race with a tenderness of which Calvary is the 
measure. He says that His anguish over the self-wrought 
misery of sinners is that of the Father over his youngest 
bom, his darling, starving in rags in a far country, and 
fighting for the husks with swine. Has any of you a 
prodigal in the wilderness ? You know what a father's 



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heart is, you know what a father's home is, while he riots 
and starves. Great Grod ! What would you not give now 
to clasp him to your heart ! And the theory of even what 
is called a moderate Calvinism, the theory in which our 
churches in vain try to find rest, is this : that Grod, who 
is rich in mercy, and who loves even the rebellious with 
an everlasting love — sterner terms cannot be used of any 
human transgression, than those with which the prophets 
denounce the sins of Israel, while they declare that Grod's 
redeeming mercy clings to them still — who cannot forsake, 
who will not cast off, holds to this purpose through the 
few years of this mortal pilgrimage, seeking and saving 
the lost, but then, when death has rounded our little 
life, drops the purpose, and watches the vast majority of 
the race He loved even unto death, writhing and wasting 
in unutterable misery through the countless ages of a 
never-ending eternity. Man made originally for Ee- 
demption; the Eedemptive purpose cherished by Grod 
from eternity ; all the forces and influences of the Uni- 
verse arrayed for its accomplishment ; the dear Son of 
His love dying voluntarily in agony and shame to make 
that purpose triumphant; the risen Christ passing into 
the heavens to carry on and to complete the Mediator's 
work, to gather together all things, in all spheres, under 
His headship, as St. Paul declares — and all operative to 
save through a span of time which is likened to a moth's 
existence, impotent to save through all the ages of 
eternity. 

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You say God is just as well as merciful; here His 
mercy reigns, there His justice. Yes, Grod is just, blessed 
be His name, therefore the Atonement, wherein 6 mercy 
and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have 
kissed each other.' But consider what you are saying in 
limiting Grod's mercy to this life, and giving to His jus- 
tice the exclusive rule through eternity. It is nowhere 
written, God is Justice ; it is written, Grod is Love. Jus- 
tice is His attribute : Love is Himself. And what you 
affirm, if your interpretation of Scripture be true, is that 
Incarnate Justice is merciful for the moments of this life, 
but that the instant the death-stroke falls it seizes again 
the sword and the scourge, and wields them thenceforth 
ruthlessly through the ages of eternity. For each being 
whom Christ died to save, whom He loves with an ever- 
lasting love — c I have graven them on the palms of My 
hands ; ' it was man's name that He engraved there on 
Calvary — there is a moment of mercy, and then an 
eternity of stern, pitiless justice, which must harden 
itself for ever against sights and sounds of anguish, which 
might break a heart of stone ! Not so have I learned 
Christ, 

' For this purpose was the Son of Grod manifested, 
that He might destroy the works of the devil.' What are 
the works of the devil in our world ? ' Sinners,' is the 
ready answer ; and on some such answer the whole annihi- 
lationist theory seems to rest. Nay, not the sinners, but 
the sin. But, it may be objected, did not Christ call 



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the sinful Jews of His time the children of the devil ? 
Yes ; giving them thereby an awful warning of the head- 
ship which they were choosing in rejecting His. But 
these very Jews, in one of the grandest passages of the 
New Testament, He calls Q His own :' 6 He came unto His 
own. 9 Those very Jews He was loving so tenderly that He 
was treading for them that moment the path to Calvary. 
For those very Jews, before many days were past, He was 
praying, 6 Father, forgive them,' as they pierced Him and 
scoffed at His dying agonies ; and to those very Jews His 
Gospel was first preached with a power which brought 
them in heart-broken penitence to the seat of His mercy ; 
and His very murderers He raised through death to stand 
justified and sanctified, the first-fruits of His triumph 
before His glorious throne. ' God is angry with the 
wicked every day ; ' ' His wrath against them burns like 
fire.' But while His wrath burns against their sin. His 
love burns for their salvation. Their sin is the devil's work, 
their souls are His offspring ; them He ever seeks and 
ever must seek to save, their sin He seeks and ever must 
seek, as the work of the devil, to destroy. 

Can anything be more miserable than the picture of 
reconciliation, 6 the reconciliation of all things,' ' Christ 
all in all,' which the annihilationists present to us ? There 
are some who, unlike the majority of the school, believe 
in the possibility of future ministries of mercy. They 
tell us that the annihilationists alone can put a true 
meaning on the passages which proclaim the reconcilia- 



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tion of all things to Christ. Yes ; the reconciliation of 
all things by the destruction of multitudes whom Christ 
died to reconcile. A sweeping stroke of destruction, and 
then all is reconciled and restored. Have you loved and 
lost ? Have you a passionate longing 

To feel the touch of a vanish'd hand 
And the sound of a voice that is still ? 

Do tears rush unbidden to your eyes as you number your 
dear ones, and one, the prodigal it may be, is not ? Ah f 
you never loved and sought like Christ, yet your heart 
strains to and yearns for the lost ! May Grod keep me 
from delighting in the thought of a reconciliation, a 
6 restoration of all things,' which is to be consecrated by 
a sentence of annihilation ! I think that the memory ot 
that doomsman's stroke would be burnt into my shudder- 
ing brain for ever and for ever. 

No ; the constant and solemn assurance of Grod's word 
that His mercy is everlasting, that His nature is love, 
that His tenderness to sinners is ineffable, while His 
chastisement of their sin is stern and dire, together with 
the revelation of the purpose and the hope with which 
He redeemed the world, as set forth in many glorious 
passages of His word, compel me to believe that this 
Universe is the theatre of boundless and endless ministries 
of mercy, working through pain to blessed issues ; that 
the love which won the sceptre on Calvary will wield it as 
a power, waxing ever, waning never, through all the ages ; 
and that the Father will never cease from yearning over 
the prodigals, and Christ will never cease from seeking 



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119 



the lost, while one knee remains stubborn before the name 
of Jesus, and one heart is unmastered by His love. 

And now we can face the vision of the terrible pain 
which saddens the outlooks of life as disclosed in the 
Divine word. It is not Christ's will, but man's will, that 
it should be endured. There is pain everywhere, from 
the writhing worm, up to the great Spirit whom your 
transgression wounds and grieves ; life develops itself, and 
spirit fulfils its ministry, through pain. The pain in the 
lower region springs from the struggle for existence ; in 
the higher, the region of human endeavour and aspira- 
tion, the holier pain of life springs from the effort to live 
like God. And there is the pain of the fallen, the faith- 
less ; the spirit wedded to the base and perishing ; the soul 
cleaving to the dust. The agony of the hunger of a 
spirit feeding on ashes, of the heir herding with swine, of 
the man born 'to glorify Grodand to enjoy Him for ever,' 
grovelling like the beasts, passes all forms of anguish but 
one, which a man can endure. To know love and to hate 
it, to see Christ and to scorn Him, to hear the call to 
heaven and to set the face hellwards, to trample down 
convictions, aspirations, yearnings, hopes, and to go out 
into the night knowing that you have crucified Christ 
afresh and put Him to an open shame — this is to go 
down to the darkness and horror of the pit; this is to 
taste the torment of hell. 

And say not, this is a dark, terrible side of the religion 
of Christ. The Bible reveals the horror, but does not 
create it ; it is in man, in the constitution of things, in 



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the system of the Universe; the anguish of sin is the 
torment of the life of all peoples, it impels men to the most 
terrible cruelties, the most frantic excesses, that stain the 
blood-red page of history. It is not Christian peoples 
who will swing with a hook through their quivering flesh, 
or lie crushed beneath the wheels of the murderous car, 
if they may but wash the sin stains from their con- 
sciences, or lift their crushing burden from their hearts. 
There is no picture which you can paint of the torment of 
sin which man's apprehension, when conscience is fairly 
aroused and resolute, will not exaggerate : there is no 
sentence which you can pass to which his righteous instinct 
will not say amen. This springs out of the dread endow- 
ment of freedom ; the spirit which may be lifted in 
freedom, willing, loving, to share the ineffable glory and 
bliss of the Eedeemer, can degrade itself in freedom to a 
shame and a misery which might touch the pity of the 
fiends. It is a dread endowment ; whole peoples have 
shrunk from it, have shuddered at it. But Grod presses it 
upon us by the very constitution of our nature ; He will 
have none of us abdicate it, because He can bring the 
resources of an infinite and everlasting love to bear on its 
determinations, and has eternity before Him to work out 
the results. 

But because of this large scale and boundless range of 
our nature He can bring himself to the infliction of long 
and terrible pain. The Scriptures open to the wilful 
sinner who has seen and hated the love, a vision of 



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6 eternal death.' It is a mistake to associate the idea of 
duration necessarily with the word eternal. Those who 
will look into it will find that there is no great word of 
Scripture which is used with more various shades of mean- 
ing, and with less of strict definition. In truth it 
describes the sphere into which our definitions do not run. 
When employed with the word death it presents the 
estate of the godless spirit ; a horror of great darkness 
around it, godless, lifeless, hopeless for ever. I believe 
that the hardened sinners who turn from the light and 
hate the Son, who will not have the blessed and the mer- 
ciful to be their king, doom themselves — Heaven but 
registers the sentence — to this experience of eternal death. 
They are doomed to know all that it means to be Christ- 
less, hopeless, lifeless, in any sense that makes life a 
possession; to feel all the horror of that Grod-forsaken 
darkness which cast its dread shadow for a moment over 
the Lord. The tenderness which they slighted, the love 
which they spurned, the truth which they scoffed at, the 
glory and the bliss which they lost, burnt into their shud- 
dering memory, as they discover all that lies for a spirit 
in the devil's headship, through what is to them as 
eternity. 

It is a vision before which we tremble and are meant 
to tremble ; 4 it is a fearful thing ' for a rebellious spirit 
6 to fall into the hands of the living Grod.' But the 
burden, which would else be too crushing, is lifted in a 
measure from our spirits, as we see around, above, beyond 



122 



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this dread experience, the boundless and everlasting minis- 
tries of mercy, drawing the sinner through the depths of 
anguish, to the light, to the home, to the heart of Grod. 
Man plunged in the horror of the darkness of the sin 
that he cleaves to — the everlasting mercy around and 
beyond him still. 

And now I must set before you the principle on which 
I interpret the threatening^ of eternal penalties, ever- 
lasting sufferings, which lie sparely but plainly on the 
face of the Divine word. I interpret them precisely on 
the principle on which experience compels, I should rather 
say instructs, us — it should need no compulsion — to in- 
terpret the original sentence on transgTessors, which was 
clear, explicit, and stern as these : 6 In the day that thou 
eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.' We see boundless 
ministries of mercy working through terrible anguish, 
through all the pain and strain of earth's sad history, 
between the sentence and its execution. Adam lived on, 
lives on in glorious bliss. Was the sentence, then, an idle 
word, a vague threat, forgotten the moment that it had 
passed from the awful lips ? Nay ; Grod meant it to the 
depth. It expressed the natural, and, as far as nature's 
possibilities were concerned, the inevitable issue of trans- 
gression.. Sinning, man began at once to taste of death. 
It lay in the natural necessity of things ; from death the 
sinner could create, could find, no way of escape. But 
there was a yet diviner necessity which dominated the 
natural ; that whereby it became the Creator who dowered 



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123 



the human with freedom, to become its Saviour, to find 
its ransom, to save it 6 from going down into the pit.' 
At the heart of this necessity the Divine love was glowing, 
and in the path of this necessity lay the 6 cross and passion, 
the death and burial, the resurrection and ascension ' of 
the incarnate (rod. So here the threatening is meant to 
its depths. Sin, anguish — while sin exists. It is the 
sentence which is written in the constitution of man and 
of all things ; sin and suffering are indissolubly wedded, 
while Grod lives, while eternity endures. But the sentence 
is not the master of mercy. The strong One in the Uni- 
verse is Grod, and ' Grod is Love. 5 

Just as in the case of the first sentence on the first 
transgressor, Grod found the way, though through awful 
anguish to Himself and to the sinner, of maintaining His 
law and saving His child, so through the terrible pain and 
despair of which sin must be the parent, to free beings 
who hunger for its baits and listen to its lies, ministries of 
mercy, resting on the Atonement, shall in like manner be 
ever seeking to master nature by spirit, sin by grace, hate 
by love. The sentence on sin is not a penalty which it 
pleases Grod to fix, and which it may please Him at any 
moment to unfix ; it is a yet more dread reality. Suffer- 
ing is not the penalty on sin, it is the fruit of sin ; sin is 
its bitter fountain, and must well it forth so long as it 
endures. 

Destruction of sinners! I believe in it profoundly. 
There is a Divine and blessed way of destroying sinners, by 



124 



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destroying sin. The sinner perishes ; the son is saved. 
When David uttered such tremendous curses against his 
enemies and (rod's, was it the souls of men which he 
hated and would joyfully see exterminated ? Or was it 
the hateful lusts, passions, and malignities which hindered 
and opposed his work for his realm and for Gfod's ? Could 
each one of those foes on whom his anathema fell have 
been brought to repentance, to loving, loyal submission 
to God and to His king, would not David have felt 
with abounding joy that the deepest wish of his heart 
was most blessedly fulfilled ? And Grod would have been 
the teacher who taught His servant to take such joy in 
such a destruction of his foes. And this is the key to 
the great drama of man's freedom through all the ages of 
the future. The sentence, stern, absolute, irrevocable, 
against sinners ; the merciful Christ wielding the power 
which He won on Calvary to draw them through the 
anguish to His everlasting home and rest. 

' Grod wills ail men to be saved and to come to a know- 
ledge of the truth.' Yes, you tell me, but man's sinful 
nature withstands it ; man's will to sin frustrates this will 
of Grod. Should it be so incredible^ then, that when the 
sentence is passed man's submission may withstand it, 
and grace may triumph, so that the merciful will may 
have free course at last ? Is this an idea which should 
waken bitter opposition in many a so-called Christian 
heart ? Is a sentence of anguish, then, the one thing that 
can know no resistance, no reversal, over which no benign 



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125 



ministries of mercy, though Christ's everlasting love be 
their fountain, can prevail through eternity ? 

Wisely writes the late Mr. Gilbert in his 4 Lectures 
on the Atonement,' delivered when I was young, in the 
series of Congregational lectures which were regarded as 
props of orthodoxy in their times : 6 As a threatening has 
not strictly the binding power of an engagement, so 
neither has it strictly the power of a prediction.' ' The 
attempt to prove that the Divine Being is as much 
obliged to fulfil His threatenings as His promises must be 
manifestly futile, since while He ever abides faithful to the 
one, we have the evidence of fact that He doth not hold 
Himself equally bound by the other.' 1 

But this doctrine of mercy, this vision of the minis- 
tries of the love which won on Calvary its power to save, 
through all the spheres of being, through all the ages of 
the future, is hateful to multitudes who call themselves 
disciples. Many true-hearted believers may be honestly 
distressed by it, because, having confined their thoughts 
mainly to a particular class of passages, tbey conceive that 
it contradicts the plain teaching of the word of Grod. 
But there are many who rage against it in what I cannot 
but call a malignant spirit, and fling their little shafts 
against any who would gladly bind it to their hearts. 

I read in one of these annihilationist writers an in- 
dignant complaint, that if these ministries of mercy be 

1 The principle here set forth seems to me to be equally valid for eternity 
as for time. 



126 



THE GOSPEL OP LOVE. 



possible through the long ages, he, and saints like him 
might be compelled to sit down, some day, in a far-off, 
futurity, with men whose names are held in Christian 
execration, in the Kingdom of God. The words 6 Shame ! 
shame !' as I read it, rose instinctively to my lips. The 
elder son, who ' was angry and would not go in,' is still 
abroad amongst us in Christendom. Well might the 
Saviour say, ' Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, 
will He find faith upon the earth ? ' Will He find dis- 
ciples who believe the simplest, the most fundamental 
principle of His Gospel, and who know that the yearning 
passion of His heart is the passion to seek and to save 
the lost ? How many among 6 His own 9 will He find 
exulting in the thought that 6 this man, because He con- 
tinueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood ; wherefore 
He is able to save even to the uttermost all that come 
unto God by Him, seeing that He ever liveth to make 
intercession for them,' in all the ages, in all the spheres. 

I hold, then, that the anguish of sin lies in the very 
nature of sin, and that the sentence declares God's eternal 
counsel that the sinner must bear his curse, his hell, with 
him wherever he moves. But I hold that that ordinance 
which for ever weds sin with suffering has a mind of mercy 
in it and not of vengeance, and that the purpose and the 
end of all the terrible suffering that fills the Universe is 
the training of free men to know the essential misery of 
transgression, to hate it, to shudder at it as they shudder 
at death ; that they may know the love, the life, in which 



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it is God's purpose that they shall be eternally blessed. 
I see before me a great vision of pain ; the suffering of 
free spirits is not ended here. Nay, it is manifest that 
the righteous here have not finished their education ; 
multitudes of good men pass to the gate of death laden 
with infirmity, with graces smirched and virtues crippled ; 
halting disciples, whose culture has to be carried on and 
perfected on high. There will be struggle and discipline 
for many of us, but we shall bear it joyfully in the radiant 
light of hope, and in the cherishing, quickening atmo- 
sphere of love. 

But multitudes, haters of their own souls, lovers of 
the gates of death, will pass out to learn what death 
means. 6 Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard ' the 
joys, the glories of the sons in the kingdom of their 
Father ; ' eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard ' the 
agonies which the rebels doom themselves to endure. 
But we can bear to look upon the vision. t is not the 
hand of an Almighty tormentor, in vengeance for ever 
crushing the hopeless ; it is the stern chastisement of a 
righteous Father, which aims at breaking the rebel and 
saving the son. When I see that the love which suffered 
on Calvary has won the right to urge its plea, to wield its 
power, to win its triumphs, in all the ages, in all the 
worlds, all the horror seems to pass out of the agony 
through which the sinning creature may yet have to 
struggle, in being born into the world of everlasting and 
glorious liberty and joy. The grandeur of the scale on 



128 



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which our nature is fashioned and the range of its destiny 
explain the cost at which it shall be redeemed, that it 
may people all the mansions of eternity. 

There are those who see further. They read in passage 
after passage, notably in Paul's later epistles, when the 
prophet eye had clearer range through the mist of death, 
a vision unfolded of a universal restoration. Sin destroyed, 
love triumphant ; all beings, all things, through all the 
boundless spheres, gathered under the Headship of Christ ; 
freely fulfilling the Father's commandment, at rest in the 
bosom of the Saviour's love. If that be a vision of hope, 
the hope that heaven cherishes as its most sacred pos- 
session, the hope in which the Creator saw ' subjected to 
vanity' the worlds which He had made, I share the joyful 
inspiration. But if it is asserted that here is a Divine 
decree, whereby God determines that when the sin and 
the suffering have endured through the space of His 
patience He will put forth His power and end them, 
bidding the sinner cease from sinning, and rounding the 
era of freedom by the proclamation of an age of universal 
serenity and peace ; if that is what is meant, and that is 
the assertion of Universalism, it seems to me to throw a 
terrible unreality about the drama of freedom, about all 
the struggle, travail, groaning, and anguish of the world. 
It seems to me to rob the life of moral liberty of that 
dignity, that control of destiny, which alone explain the 
suffering that it endures. It makes man in his freedom 
seem perilously like the puppet cf a master showman, 



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129 



who leads forth as it pleases him, and stays when it 
pleases him, the procession of the sins and the sorrows of 
mankind. 

If man wills to sin on, it is the awful prerogative of 
his nature to be able to sin on, and to perpetuate the 
struggle and the sorrow of life. It is the shadow of sad- 
ness over the Universe, which God has chosen in His 
good pleasure to dower with this dread inheritance. It 
is the possibility which was born when the head of a 
race of free men was brought forth into the world. The 
glorious powers, and the possibilities of development into 
forms of God-like strength and beauty, which God the 
Redeemer has brought forth, and evermore brings forth, 
from this world of human travail, fill the Universe with 
exulting joy and adoring songs. But always this shadow 
haunts it and must haunt it, till the last rebellious spirit 
has bent the knee at the name of Jesus, and entered into 
life through His love. 

There are those who believe that a Divine decree has 
ordained both that end and that time. But we are here 
out of the sphere of omnipotent power and sovereign 
decrees. God, in creating the world of freedom, self- 
limited the ruling powers of His kingdom to the light of 
His truth and the might of His love. Here we must 
leave it. We have no power to formulate the doctrine of 
' the last things.' Our knowledge must, in any case, be 
too narrow and vague to make our definitions clear and 
our dogmas sure; therefore the field of vision is wisely 

K 



130 



THE GOSPEL OF LOVE. 



left with the shadows on it, through which we see the 
sons passing up to complete their training, the rebels 
passing down to learn all that may be meant by death, 
and Christ's mercy, pregnant with redeeming influence 
as ever, folding round and brooding over all. My hope for 
the future of the human, the race, the world, which 
Christ died to redeem, is my faith in the everlasting 
power of the blood of atonement to purify, quicken, and 
save. I dare not interpret the sentence as a decree of 
torment. So neither can I interpret the purpose and the 
hope as a decree of restoration. I leave the future of 
man where I leave my own, with Him whose ways are too 
deep, too high, too large for my little understanding, 
but who, while He loves — and He is Love — can never 
cease to yearn over sinners ; while He lives — and He is 
Life — can never cease to seek that He may save. 

And now I have finished the task which I set my- 
self, and which it has cost me more to carry through than 
many of you dream. What may be the immediate issue 
to myself and to my ministry I know not; necessity 
has been laid upon me to speak, and the issue is out of 
my hands. But it pains me deeply to cause distrust and 
anxiety to any who look to me for teaching ; and it can- 
not but be that some will be perplexed and troubled, by 
these larger views of the range of the one everlasting 
Gospel, 'repentance toward Grod and faith in our Lord 
Jesus Christ,' and of the future eternal ministries of 
redeeming love. Some will be troubled and some will 



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131 



fall away. I feel that such crises as these are times of 
searching to congregations, and they are times which are 
needed. A state of easy prosperity is good neither for 
communities nor for souls. Seasons of anxiety and per- 
plexity, of searchings of Scripture and searchings of heart, 
may be ordained in mercy. There are many, I fear, who 
will think that I have robbed their Christianity of a terror 
to which they largely trusted, as an instrument to frighten 
men from sin, and to drive them into the Saviour's fold. 
I trust that they will find, when they look into it a little 
more closely, that I have endeavoured to substitute the 
fear of a father for the dread of a tyrant, the fear which 
makes sons, for the terror which makes slaves or brutes. 1 
But we shall soon have grown out of this dependence on 
terror. The very parable of Dives, which is constantly 
used in this discussion, was manifestly meant as a warning 
of its impotence. The blessedness of right-doing, the 
wretchedness of wrong-doing, now and ever, is the Christian 
doctrine ; and the time is coming when this truth, and 
not the terrors, will wield the chief power over human 
consciences and hearts. 

Those who have been long familiar with my ministry 
— in fifteen months I shall have been for thirty years the 
minister of this congregation, and there are those here 
who have been with me from the first — will find nothing 
startling in this counsel of God, which step by step I 

1 The brutalising influence of the popular doctrine on the manners ami 
morals of Christendom is a subject which has yet to be explored. 

k 2 



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THE GOSPEL OF LOVE. 



have been led to see and to declare. It lies latent in the 
idea of God's Fatherhood of the great human family, the 
preaching of which, some twenty years ago, involved me 
in so much painful opposition and controversy ; through 
which stormy time my congregation stood by me with 
an affection and constancy, which has always led me to 
magnify the freedom and the power of the position which 
is occupied by the minister of an Independent church. 
Step by step God's counsel has unfolded itself before me, 
and in my last book on 6 The Higher Life ' there was the 
germ of all which I have now proclaimed. Those who 
have followed me thus far in my ministry have nothing 
to recant or unlearn in receiving this doctrine ; they have 
simply ' to follow on to know the truth.' But some will 
fall away. If it is love for what they believe to be the 
truth of Christ's Gospel which leads them to forsake my 
ministry, I beg them to believe that I shall honour their 
loyalty to what they conceive to be the Master's teachings, 
as heartily as I call upon them to honour mine. I am 
prepared for whatever results my fidelity to my con- 
victions and to the truth of the Gospel may bring. I 
could not speak otherwise than as I have spoken ; the 
rest I leave with God. 

But I plead once more for my younger brethren, to 
many of whom this subject is a source of keen mental 
anguish, and whose position, whose prospects, whose very 
life, may depend on the sympathy with which the struggles 
of their minds towards the truth may be met. If they 



THE GOSPEL OF LOVE. 



133 



preach Christ, if you see that His love manifestly con- 
strains them, if the one aim of their ministry is to draw 
men to closer fellowship with His spirit, honour them, 
cherish them, strengthen them ; do not frown on them 
and forsake them, if the hope gladdens their hearts that 
Christ's dear love may have blessed ministries of mercy to 
accomplish through all the ages and in all the worlds. 

And I would that my word might reach the elders, 
the leaders of our religious communities and of our great 
societies, and I may speak as myself almost an elder. 
Unless they are prepared for the breaking up of our 
churches and the shattering of our institutions, they must 
allow this to be an open question, to be freely discussed, 
thought out, and brought forth into the sun. Where the 
subject so transcends the range of our imagination, and 
where the sphere of knowledge is necessarily so vague 
and dim, where the language of Scripture is open to such 
varieties of interpretation, and has hints and suggestions 
which we all feel to be beyond the grasp of our thought, 
they must be willing to allow their younger brethren to 
follow these suggestions in the direction to which the love 
of Grod in Christ may appear to guide them, nor be grieved 
if they seek to strengthen themselves with the hope 
which 6 Paul the aged ' in his last years would seem to 
have clasped very closely to his heart. 

I have spoken strongly on this doctrine of annihila- 
tion; I have uttered the pent-up convictions of years. If 
I have spoken too strongly and hardly, and have wounded 



134 



THE GOSPEL OF LOVE. 



any, I pray them to forgive me. But I have been especi- 
ally desirous to keep names and persons out of the con- 
troversy, and have always been most careful to specify the 
precise form of the doctrine at which my opposition was 
aimed. In one sense the Church owes a great debt of 
gratitude to this school of thinkers ; they have persisted 
in fixing attention on a monstrous and incredible doctrine. 
Many of them I can well believe sought these untenable 
dogmas as a refuge ; I can only pray that they may be led 
on to what the Gospel compels me to believe is a larger 
and more blessed, because more Christian, truth. 

But enough of men. I plead for Christ, for the 
honour of His name, for the power of His salvation, for 
the glory of His cross, for the endless and boundless 
ministries of that Eedemption, the virtue of which we are 
asked to believe is stricken to impotence by the hand of 
Death. I plead for the hope of the destruction of the 
work of the devil in the Universe, by the salvation of all 
that bears trace of the touch of the hand of God. Sin 
withered under the curse of the souls that were once its 
victims ; the devil spoiled of his dark dominion, not by 
the fiat of omnipotent will, but by the hand of omnipotent 
love. Hell destroyed ; Christ triumphant : gathering the 
fruits of His Cross and Passion here and in all the worlds ! 



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